Word: giotto
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...worst fears of the international Giotto team, it seemed, had been realized. Fully aware of the dangers of meeting any outsize dust particles at the tremendous speed of encounter but determined to get a closeup look, the scientists had aimed the spacecraft to swoop only 338 miles from Halley's dust-shrouded nucleus. That, according to Roger Bonnet, ESA's director of scientific programs, was like playing Russian roulette: "You may survive, but one shot will kill...
...indeed a gamble. In the last seconds before the encounter, Giotto ran into what one scientist described as a "wall of dust the size of grains of sand." The spacecraft's protective dust shields were peppered with particles at a rate of 100 impacts a second, a bombardment that swung its antenna out of alignment with a tracking station in Australia. That brought communications to a halt. But before the blackout, Giotto relayed more than 2,000 images of Halley's back to earth, plus a torrent of data from the ten on-board instruments...
...control center, cheers rang out and champagne corks popped. Then came the bonus. Half an hour after the screens blacked out, Giotto's signals were picked up again; except for the camera, all of its instruments were still working...
Although scientists will be interpreting Giotto's data for months to come, Horst Keller, principal investigator of the camera team, announced some preliminary results. Halley's nucleus appeared to be 9.4 miles long and at least 2.5 miles wide, he said, and the surface, "velvet black and very irregular, with an indentation in the middle, like a peanut or a potato." On one side of the nucleus were what appeared to resemble nozzles, spewing out one minor and two major jets of gas and dust. Keller was puzzled by the blackness of the nucleus, which suggested that there is little...
...Giotto's grand finale was preceded by the flybys of the second Soviet Vega and two Japanese craft. Early in the week, Vega 2 passed 5,125 miles from the comet's nucleus, sending back 700 pictures and confirming that the nucleus was solid. But the dust clouds encountered by the craft disabled nearly half of its solar panels and two of its experiments...