Lockheed Begins New Year with Spotlight on Two NASA Missions
Posted on: Friday, 2 January 2004, 06:00 CST
Jan. 2--Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County starts the new year with two high-profile NASA missions in succession today and Saturday.
First comes the Stardust spacecraft, which was launched five years ago. It is expected to fly by a comet 242 million miles from Earth today to gather tiny fragments for scientific study.
The spacecraft, built at Lockheed Martin's facility at Waterton Canyon and guided by a team of engineers there, will make the pass at about 12:40 p.m.
On Saturday, at about 9:35 p.m., a golf-cart-sized rover named Spirit, launched in June, is expected to land on Mars.
Lockheed Martin engineers in Colorado created a shell to protect the lander, and its sister craft Opportunity, from high temperatures as they enter the Martian atmosphere. The engineers also built another shell atop the craft that holds a parachute.
Some communications from the device will be routed through two Lockheed Martin-built Mars orbiters, Odyssey and Global Surveyor, already at the Red Planet. Engineers at the Waterton Canyon- based mission center will also handle those operations.
Spirit and Opportunity, which will land on the other side of Mars on Jan. 24, have another Colorado connection: Broomfield-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. built antennas and other equipment for both.
The Mars landings, each costing about $400 million and designed to search for signs of past water on the planet, are particularly risky. Many similar attempts have failed.
A European probe named Beagle 2 landed last week but has been out of contact since. Lockheed Martin engineers are familiar with failure on Mars, having built the Mars Polar Lander that was lost in 1999.
The $200 million Stardust mission, orchestrated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., also is a walk on the wild side.
The spacecraft is intended to pass within 186 miles of the comet Wild 2 as it catches gas and dust that envelop the ball of ice and rock.
NASA expects the spacecraft to take 72 black-and-white pictures of the comet's nucleus, which is 3.3 miles in diameter. The first of those images could be received on Earth as early as this afternoon.
In 2006, Stardust will jettison a canister containing its catch during a fly-by of Earth. The canister and its extraterrestrial cargo are expected to plummet onto an uninhabited area of Utah. Scientists then hope to analyze the particles.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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