Researchers compete for NASA space exploration

Diamondbacks.com: Researchers compete for NASA space exploration
A university researcher's spacecraft design could soon be exploring the face of comets if chosen as the winner of a NASA competition.

If selected as winner of NASA's 12th Discovery Competition, senior research scientist Jessica Sunshine's project — which was among three finalists selected out of 28 proposals submitted to NASA last September — would fly to a comet to study its evolving composition and better understand how the universe formed.

The $420 million project, Comet Hopper, is an automated capsule-like spacecraft no larger than a person, designed to withstand a comet's low gravity by slowly drifting to different areas on the icy structure, Sunshine said.

"It's designed to land on a comet multiple times to explore both the composition and physical differences across a comet," said Sunshine, who has been studying comets for 14 years.

If selected to move forward in the competition, Sunshine said Comet Hopper — which has already received $3 million from NASA for placing in the final three — would launch in December 2016 to land on the Wirtanen comet. Once landed, it would study the comet's physical changes, like melting ice, as it makes its two-and-a-half year journey toward the sun.

"The comet kind of comes alive," Sunshine said. "Ice evaporates as it approaches the sun, and materials come off it."

The information collected from Comet Hopper could provide a unique window into studying comets, which Sunshine said are diverse and made of the most primitive materials in the solar system — likely the same ingredients used to form the planets.

"If we can understand what these building blocks are like, it can help us understand how planetary formation started," Sunshine said. "It ultimately comes back to how did we get here as human beings?"

Project co-investigator Tony Farnham said Comet Hopper would be a breakthrough project because it would better explore the broad variety of materials present on a comet, which vary by area.

"This will be the first mission we have where we can sample the surface of a comet in many different regions," Farnham said.

The project could stand out from past comet exploration missions because Comet Hopper could stay on the comet long enough to study how it continuously evolves, Sunshine said. The comet would be actively monitored for about 100 days.

"All of our existing cometary exploration has been flybys relatively close to the sun," Sunshine said. "We see snapshots of material coming off [comets], but we have no idea how it evolves."

Although Comet Hopper wouldn't be guaranteed to launch into space if it was selected as the winning project next June, lead Discovery programs scientist Michael New said the project would be expected to soar into the cosmos eventually.

"The anticipation is whatever we select we will launch," New said.

Sunshine said Comet Hopper being selected as a NASA finalist further builds on the university's successful relationship with NASA for comet exploration, picking up from where past university-led missions like Deep Impact — another space mission to a comet led by a university professor — have left off.

"The fact that NASA came back with us is in no small measure to how well we did with Deep Impact," Sunshine said. "This is clearly the next step."