SPACE.com -- Contour Loss Viewed By U.S. Military Sensors

CONTOUR being mated with solid rocket motor. CREDIT: NASA/APL

Artist's rendering shows the planned firing of CONTOUR's STAR 30BP solid-propellant rocket motor, designed to send the craft beyond Earth's orbit on Aug. 15, 2002. The craft would have been spinning at 60 revolutions per minute. The 50-second engine burn was meant to inject Contour into a solar orbit, on course to intercept comets.

In this subtracted image in which moving objects are revealed by pairs of images, one dark and one bright, taken by Jim Scotti with the Spacewatch 1.8-meter telescope on Kitt Peak on Aug. 16, there are two parallel trails near one of the predicted positions of the CONTOUR spacecraft. These trails were discovered and measured by Jeff Larsen.

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	Contour Loss Viewed By U.S. Military Sensors By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:34 pm ET 09 September 2002

U.S. military space assets were likely looking in on the now lost-to-space Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) probe when it fired its solid-propellant rocket motor on August 15.

The Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland -- maker of the NASA comet surveying spacecraft -- made the request via the JPL CONTOUR navigation team two weeks prior to the 50-second burn. APL wanted to alert military officials that the solid rocket motor burn would occur as scheduled. The request was primarily to alert U.S. military organizations so they would not be surprised by the probe's engine firing, according to an APL source.

SpaceCommand spokesman, Major Barry Venable, told SPACE.com that "fairly unique capabilities" were used to help NASA find and determine what happened to CONTOUR. "We made our data available to them," he said.

U.S. military information gleaned about the seemingly failed probe would be made available to a newly appointed CONTOUR Mishap Investigation Board by request, given the proper security clearances appropriate to the data and a "need to know," Venable said.

The U.S. Space Command maintains several sensors utilized to conduct space surveillance in support of military missions. "For reasons of operational security, I cannot address whether or not any of those sensors observed the CONTOUR motor burn," Venable said .

Meanwhile, the full CONTOUR 15-person investigation board has been named. A list made available to SPACE.com includes members, advisors, and observers. Chaired by Theron Bradley, chief engineer of NASA, the mishap study group includes experts from Marshall Space Flight Center, Goddard Space Flight Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as the Aerospace Corporation.