Word: halley
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...ultraviolet telescopes and two wide-angle cameras. For much of the mission, the instruments will be studying such exotica as quasars, black holes and globular clusters, but for a while during the days that the five international probes encounter the comet, all of Columbia's eyes will be on Halley's. One of the Astro-1 telescopes will peer at very short wavelength light to see if it can detect such elements as helium, neon and argon, which would reveal something about what temperatures were like at the time the solar system formed. If neon were detected, for example, scientists...
NASA scientists insist that given the briefness and the danger of the flybys, Astro-1 could actually end up gleaning more information about Halley's than the probes do. "Our mission may not be as dramatic," says Knox Long, a Johns Hopkins University scientist on the Astro project, "but we're getting the most bang for the buck...
...view from ground-based obser vatories is of great impor tance as well. It was with the mammoth 200-incher at Palomar Observatory in California that Astronomers David C. Jewitt and G. Edward Danielson first spied Halley's, on Oct. 16, 1982, when it was more than 1 billion miles from earth. Ever since then, most of the world's major telescopes have been trained on the comet at some point. At Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., Astronomers Lawrence Wasserman and Edward Bowell have calculated 40 points on the comet's route at which it will pass directly in front...
...examine the hydrogen cloud surrounding the comet. The Soviet Union's Vega 1 and Vega 2 will analyze the abundant dust motes and charged gases that envelop the comet's nucleus. Most remarkable of all, data and pictures from the Vega twins will enable European scientists to chart Halley's course precisely enough to allow their probe, Giotto, to come within about 300 miles of the nucleus, snapping thousands of photographs as it swoops by. Says Kunio Hirao, a former top official at Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), "This kind of space-based collaboration by scientists...
Although for budgetary reasons it opted in 1981 against launching a Halley's probe of its own, NASA nonetheless remains smack in the middle of the action. The agency plans to dedicate part of two shuttle missions, including the flight that will boost aloft Teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, to comet- related experiments. The Solar Max satellite, brought back to life l8 months ago by a shuttle repair crew and now performing its normal duty of monitoring the sun, will examine Halley's off and on for about 60 days. Pioneer 12, in orbit around Venus, will watch Halley's when...