EPOXI flyby of Earth
Sun Dec 30, 2007 at 19:54 UTC
After its encounter with Tempel 1, the Deep Impact spacecraft, now being used for the EPOXI mission, continues in its orbit around the sun that will bring it towards Earth for a flyby on 31 December 2007.
On the last day of 2007, the spacecraft achieves its closest approach to Earth - the altitude is a mere 19,310 km above eastern Asia.
Along the way, there have been some trajectory correction maneuvers (TCMs) to adjust the spacecraft's path so that after the flyby it will be in an orbit that will intersect with comet Hartley 2 in 2010.
During the flyby, the spacecraft will experience a gravity assist from Earth that will steal some of the orbital energy from the spacecraft, changing its orbit. Additional Earth flybys in 2008 and 2009 will refine the orbit even further.
The EPOCh component (Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization) of the EPOXI mission takes place between January 26 and end of May, 2008 and will carefully study a small number of stars in order to learn more about planets that we know are orbiting those stars, and to search for clues to other planets that might be orbiting the same stars.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/GSFC
This white-light image of the Moon was taken by the NASA EPOXI mission as part of the Earth-Moon Flyby calibration of the instruments. The image was taken by the High Resolution Instrument (HRI) visual imaging camera at 22:00 UTC on 29 Dec 2007, when the spacecraft was at about three times the Earth's distance from the Moon. To compensate for the defocus of the HRI telescope, the calibrated image was post-processed using 20 iterations of a modified Lucy-Richardson deconvolution procedure that includes wavelet noise dampening. The overly bright limb of the moon is the most noticeable artifact of the deconvolution.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD/GSFC/Tony Farnham
High resolution image
After its encounter with Tempel 1 (green arc), the Deep Impact spacecraft, now called EPOXI, continued in its orbit (yellow ellipse) around the sun that will bring it past Earth on 31 Dec 2007. Along the way, there have been some trajectory correction maneuvers (TCMs) to adjust the spacecraft's path so that after the flyby it will be in an orbit (white circles) that will intersect with comet Hartley 2 (red arc) in 2010. During the flyby, the spacecraft will experience a gravity assist from Earth (blue circle) that will steal some of the orbital energy from the spacecraft, changing its orbit from the yellow path to the white one.
| Source: University of Maryland | |
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