NASA announced late Monday that an investigation team has been formed to delve into all aspects of the apparent loss of the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) spacecraft as discussion began on the possibility of a CONTOUR II mission.

Since it rocketed out of Earth orbit, the comet-bound probe has been silent. Repeated attempts to awaken the dead craft have been unsuccessful.

Last Friday, the effort to get in touch with the comatose CONTOUR was scaled back. Continual monitoring for signals from the spacecraft began shortly after it fell silent on August 15. At that time the mission entered "emergency" status, making it eligible for round-the-clock coverage from NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna stations.

The craft is about three percent short in its flight path, giving rise to the belief that the solid propellant motor under-performed. As pieces of the spacecraft were also detected zipping through space, chances are dimming that the mission can be salvaged.

"Obviously we had a big problem during the firing of the solid rocket motor. The spacecraft was fine going into the burn, and coming out we weren't able to contact it," said CONTOUR Mission Director, Robert Farquhar, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL).

APL built and is managing the mission for NASA.

"So obviously we're not very optimistic about the chances of ever recovering CONTOUR again. However, we havent given up totally. There's an obligation to make sure that the spacecraft is indeed lost," Farquhar said.

"Our DSN search has been scaled back to one pass per week. What we're really shooting for is to have a concentrated effort for a few days in December when we have better geometry for the CONTOUR antennas. The Earth will be in the main beam width of our pancake beam. That's our best hopebut even then, we don't have a lot of hope that we'll recover it. But we will make that last effort,"

Joseph Ververka, Principal Investigator for the mission at Cornell University, has broached a possible CONTOUR II.

"It's important to remember that CONTOUR'S science objectives remain unique. Its the only kind of mission that allows you to study the diversity of comets," Veverka said. "It is our posture that should we not be able to recover CONTOUR, we are going to proceed aggressively with a CONTOUR II," he said.

"There are opportunities to do this, with an encounter in 2006. So CONTOUR is certainly worth doing and we're planning to have another go at it," Veverka said. "There is no real reason to change the instrumentation, they are excellent instruments. We'd probably fly the same instruments," he said.

A CONTOUR II could be flown to comet Encke and comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, the original targets for the first probe.

However, how the needed money can be found as well as NASA's interest in re-flying the mission is not clear at this time, he said.

Thanks to the spacecraft engineering work and science instrument development already done, some cost-reduction for a follow-on CONTOUR should be realized, said Reynolds. "There would be huge savings in not changing vast portions of the design and flying CONTOUR as is," he said.

NASA's collection of experts will be led by the space agency's chief engineer, Theron Bradley, Jr., a distinguished U.S. Navy engineer and new arrival at NASA since May of this year.

The team will be composed of internal NASA investigators from space science, as well as other aerospace disciplines, and external experts with extensive experience in accident examinations. The group is expected to report its initial findings to NASA Headquarters in six to eight weeks, a NASA release stated.

How many individuals will make up the team was not detailed.

NASA did state that retired Navy Admirals J. Paul Reason and Joseph Lopez are joining Bradley on the CONTOUR investigation work.

Reason is a member of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), and an aerospace consultant. Lopez currently directs Global Government Operations as an executive with Houston-based KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root).

What actually took place as CONTOUR fired its solid rocket motor remains speculative.

"We are still fairly young into the investigation. There are two possible scenarios that we're following. One that there was an outright component failure of the solid rocket motor. The other one is that there was a systemic failure of the spacecraft that was related to either the acceleration or the heating caused by the solid rocket motor burn," said APL's Edward Reynolds, CONTOUR Project Manager.

The original price tag for the now wayward CONTOUR was $159 million.

"But we're so early into this investigation. At this point we're collecting all the data that we can," Reynolds said.

Writing off the CONTOUR as a failure can't be said as yet, said APL's Farquhar. "I don't think you can say that yet. We are certainly still searching for it. We don't have too much hope," he said.

After December, if the spacecraft remains silent, "we'd probably give up," Farquhar said.