I hear this spacecraft failure is being blamed on geocaching after a local
park official found a suspicious tupperware container marked with the
geocaching website only 7.6 miles from the launch pad....

Seriously, it's too bad it looks like the CONTOUR spacecraft has been lost.  
It was a great opportunity to learn more about comets.  Unfortunately, we
have not yet perfected spaceflight - when we do, I'll look forward to
geocaching on Mars!

Jim.

On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Jim Stamm wrote:

> I know this is OT, but interesting never-the-less:
> >
> >On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Ed Cannon wrote:
> >
> >> "CONTOUR Spacecraft Possibly Destroyed, NASA Says"
> >> 
> >> "... [CONTOUR Mission Director Robert] Farquhar said late Friday that 
> >> images from a ground-based telescope of two unknown objects about 250 
> >> kilometers apart appeared to be pieces of the comet-chasing craft. He 
> >> said more investigation was needed to confirm the suspicion and that a 
> >> concerted search effort would continue at least through Monday in the 
> >> meantime.  ...
> >> 
> >> "In a teleconference with reporters Friday evening, Farquhar said the 
> >> craft's engines had almost certainly fired and that it was no longer 
> >> in Earth orbit."
> >> 
> >> Source:
> >> 
> >> http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/contour_telecon_020816.html
> >
> >
> Then, one of ours posted:
> >
> >As the observer who got the images of the spacecraft, it's certainly a sad
> >day for comet research.  Our images (in the following URL) show two trails
> >rather than the one expected, so something catastrophic must have happened.  
> >Previous spacecraft, like NEAR had two trails as well as the booster was
> >ejected, but I guess that was not supposed to happen to CONTOUR.  I wonder
> >what the two pieces are?  The spacecraft was at about the -3% of from nominal
> >burn location, so the engine burn was completed or nearly so.
> >
> >http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/contour.html
> >http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/Jeff/contour.jpg
> >
> >The first URL describes the image, the second is the image.  The spacecraft
> >is in a very dense star field near the Galactic plane, so in order to see it,
> >I subtracted the 2nd image from the first so the first image is the white
> >pair, the second is the dark pair and the residual signal from the field
> >stars appear as conjoined black/white pairs since they don't perfectly
> >subtract out.
> >
> >Jim Scotti                              
> >Lunar & Planetary Laboratory         jscotti@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu 
> >University of Arizona                
> >Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/    
> >
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Jim Scotti                              
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory         jscotti@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu 
University of Arizona                
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/