Boethin's disappearance did not come as a total shock. Whether because of the gravitational pull of a nearby planet, the pressure of pent-up gas from sublimating ice or some other mechanism, comet breakups are rather common. One study had estimated that short-period comets such as Boethin each have a better than 3 percent chance of falling apart in any given century. "Comets really don't have much strength," Meech says. "We don't know specifically the mechanism that will cause them to break apart, but we know they're pretty weak."
Still, Deep Impact's mission planners had high hopes of recovering the comet by the fall of 2007, the cutoff for making course-correction maneuvers to set up an encounter the following year. Meech recalls Deep Impact principal investigator Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park, reassuring a review committee assessing the extended mission that Meech could recover Boethin in time. "I thought, 'Please, Mike!'" she recalls. "Things can happen to comets. Oh God, the pressure!"
Meech's concerns aside, the odds favored Boethin's having survived its two orbits around the sun since 1986. And its absence from the astronomical record in 1997 made perfect sense, given its position behind the sun at the time. "I was pretty confident that we would find it," A'Hearn says. "I convinced myself that there were very good reasons for why we didn't recover it" by the time Deep Impact's mission extension came up for discussion, he adds.
In July 2007 NASA announced that it had approved the EPOXI extended mission for Deep Impact, with Boethin as the prime target. Meanwhile, if still extant, Comet Boethin was drawing nearer to the sun, which would expose it more easily to viewing by terrestrial telescopes. Years of intermittent searching gave way to weeks of more intensive hunting with Subaru and VLT. But the comet refused to show.
In August the cold trail suddenly grew warm. The Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope detected a faint blob along Boethin's orbital path. Meech and her colleagues scrambled to confirm the sighting by commandeering whatever telescopes they could. The directors of several large observatories awarded discretionary time on their instruments. Independent astronomers who had earned telescope time on the strength of their own proposals put their projects on hold to help in the search. "They gave up significant amounts of time for the project," Meech says. "Just gave it to us because they thought it was neat to help find a wayward comet for a space mission."
The clock was ticking—mission planners had precious few months to design and execute a course correction if the spacecraft was to rendezvous with Boethin in 2008. "People were calling me every day and saying, 'Have you got it? Have you got it? Have you got it?'" Meech says. By October 18, 2007, the results from the search were in—no other telescope could confirm the tentative sighting. The cometlike blob was a fluke.
The next day EPOXI mission managers made an official decision. Boethin was out and the backup target, Comet Hartley 2, was in. Hartley 2 was a promising scientific destination in its own right, but the spacecraft would not reach it until two years after the originally planned encounter with Boethin, and even longer after the budget termination of the Deep Impact project. "It was going to be four years, and it was going to be very hard to fit that in the budget limits for the extended mission," A'Hearn says.
Despite the added time and expense, NASA ultimately extended the mission, and in 2010 the spacecraft completed a successful flyby of Comet Hartley 2 at a cost of about $40 million—more than originally estimated but still a fraction of the cost of a standalone mission. "It turned out to be a blessing because that new target was absolutely fascinating and has changed a lot of our view of how comets work," Meech says.
In the meantime, though, the specter of Comet Boethin haunted Meech and her colleagues once more. In 2008, as Boethin would have been near perihelion (its closest approach to the sun), the astronomical record-keepers at the Minor Planet Center received notice that the wayward comet had been sighted. But the report, submitted by an inexperienced observer, soon proved unfounded—much to Meech's relief. "Once we declared it lost and redirected the spacecraft, we really want to be right," she says. "I was keeping my fingers crossed that it really was dead and nobody found it."
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13 Comments
Add CommentFall apart, or get deflected to a different orbit? Is it really that impossible to conceive of a near-miss pass by another Kupier belt object?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI, for one, welcome our new, comet-eating overlords.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLOL! The aliens are jacking with NASA!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of the last acts of David Hemmings? Now you see it now you don't. Thanks for the story.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf its in a new orbit,is there a possibility that it is now on a Earth crossing path?Could it now be hiding behind the Sun then coming from that direction?Which would then be unseen till it is upon us.How big is this thing?Is this the reason they spent so much time and resources trying to find it?Is its arrival date 12-21-2012?A whole lot of unanswered questions.How the hell do you lose a comet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey could rename it the "Jimmy Hoffa" comet
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Ferengi got it, like they captured the Mars Orbiter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst the xenon goes missing, now a comet's gone missing - there's definitely something going on here!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy feeling is that the Klingons used it for target practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr, it was launched by one of the Shuttles. We all know how those missions worked out.
All comments from our intellectual colleagues seem to miss the obvious possibility of NASA's 'impactor probe' being the culprit for the comet's disappearance. "slamming" into the comet's core could have triggered a gradual disintegration, or even an orbital deviation into the Sun. Who knows anyway !?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismyron - that was a different comet hit with the impactor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead the article again. The impactor probe was sent into Comet Tempel, not the missing Comet Boethin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismaybe it just disintegrated - how big/stable was it in the first observations/
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBest wishes,
Marg.