Something went wrong this morning when NASA's CONTOUR spacecraft was scheduled to fire its engines to propel it out of Earth orbit, and mission managers have lost contact with the craft and do not know what's wrong.
A spokesperson told SPACE.com that engineers are trying to track the spacecraft along the path it would have traveled had the burn occurred successfully. He said there is no indication the burn did not occur.
The maneuver was scheduled for 4:49 a.m. EDT and officials had expected to re-establish contact with the craft at 5:30 a.m.
"They haven't been able to re-establish contact with CONTOUR after the scheduled maneuver," said the spokesperson, who was in a mission control center at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University.
CONTOUR is a collaboration between NASA, Cornell University and APL. Its price tag is $159 million. The mission is designed to explore the dusty regions around two or possibly three comets.
"They didn't get a signal they still don't have one," the spokesperson said at 10:40 a.m. "We're still not sure what happened."
He was hopeful more information would be available later today.
The spacecraft was about 140 miles above the Indian Ocean when the problem occurred. It was launched in July and is designed to zoom within a hundred miles or so of the cores of at least two comets. The Kevlar-protected craft is also a test of technology. If the mission continues, its instruments could yield some of the best comet information ever. Since launch, the spacecraft has been on a highly elliptical orbitaround Earth.
The plan was to boost it into space using an onboard Star30 solid rocket motor. This approach to getting the spacecraft beyondEarth's gravity was designed specifically to reduce costs by about $10million over a system that would have propelled it directly from launchto deep space.
The 2,138-pound (970-kilogram) space probe would also spend more thanhalf its four-year mission in a form of hibernation designed to reduce theneed for power and thus trim costs further.
CONTOUR is one of ten Discovery missions approved by NASA to demonstrate a "faster, better, cheaper" approach to space science missions. Others have included Mars Pathfinder, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous and Genesis.
Another of the Discovery missions is Stardust, a comet sample mission that was launched in February 1999. It is due to encounter comet Wild 2 on Jan. 2, 2004; scoop up some cometary dust and return the material to Earth on Jan. 15, 2006.
CONTOUR mission manager Bob Farquhar of APL, who helped designed thesystem to escape Earth orbit, was unavailable for comment this morning.
NASA's most recent failures of probes like this came in 1999, namely the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter and the $165 million Mars Polar Lander.
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