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Space Science Focus: A European space mission planning to stalk a comet from outside of the solar system

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved a new campaign, called Comr Interceptor, which will launch it without any specific purpose in mind – instead waiting for a visitor from an external Solar System, or another star. The Comet Interceptor can give researchers the first glimpse of the fossil fuels of the sun, or it may reveal the chemical composition of unknown planets.It will be the first investigation to be launched into space, ready to fly at the intended destination in a short time. “We take great risks,” said GüntherHasinger, ESA’s scientific director. “But a great reward.”

The project, first launched in 2019, will be launched in 2028 with a new telescope, Ariel, designed to study the space of exoplanets. Both will travel to the second location of Lagrange (L2), a 1.5-million-kilometer gravitational force from Earth – beyond the lunar cycle – at the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope.Here, Comet Interceptor – the first ‘F-class’ of ESA’s rapid development equipment – will be floating in space, while scientists who have returned to Earth are looking for a target to visit. The goal is to find a pure, long-tailed star in a wide, long-distance orbits, known as a long-tailed star, entering the solar system for the first time.

Such a star could emerge from a giant ice shelf called the Oort Cloud, located just beyond Neptune on the outer Solar System. No machine has ever visited such a thing before. Other activities, such as ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, visit short-term comets, which spend a lot of time in the Inner Solar System in small channels and thus are highly altered by the Sun.The Comet Interceptor will give us a true first impression of the first body, ”said Alan Fitzsimmons, a stellar researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, who is not involved in this work. “We do not know what it will look like. That will be truly new science, unprecedented in history. ”

The project will include a spacecraft and two smaller probes, one of which will be developed by the Japan Space Agency (JAXA). Following the approval of the equipment last week, ESA will now select a major contractor to develop the main spacecraft, from one of the two competing projects from Thales Alenia Space in the United Kingdom and OHB Italia in Italy.

Once the spacecraft is standing at L2, you can wait there for at least six years for the right target to be close enough for the Earth’s orbit to visit. If that happens, the Comet Interceptor will shoot its thrusters and leave the L2 on the runway. The spacecraft will fly over the comet about 1,000 miles [1,000 km] to avoid any damage from nearby objects, while the smaller probes will glide closer, descending up to 250 miles [400 km] from the surface.

The whole gathering will take a few hours, but the scientific rewards are great and unmatched by far-sighted telescopes, including measurement of comet formation, gas and rising dust, its temperature, and the first near-star images. such a pure, frozen thing. That will give the window of things built at the beginning of the Solar System, 4.5 billion years ago. “It’s a message in a bottle from the time of creation,” said Michael Kueppers at ESA in Madrid, a scientist for the Comet Interceptor project.

More than a dozen long-term comets enter the Solar System every year, though not all of these can be accessed by the Comet Interceptor. The team estimates an 80% chance that a long-term comet will emerge during the Comet Interceptor on L2. Such comets can be seen a few months in advance before they get too close to the Solar interior system, so having a precise spacecraft on the L2 makes flying easier than trying to schedule a short notice from Earth.

In the unlikely event that a long-term comet does not appear, the campaign will be re-completed to visit another target, such as 73P / Schwassmann – Wachmann 3, a short-term coma thought to be broken into pieces.Some of the most interesting ones out there, though. Five years ago, two objects were spotted flying in our Sun which are believed to have been released from other solar systems, ‘Omuamua in 2017 and comet Borisov in 2019. The telescopic view gave a brief glimpse of these fast-moving visitors, and sent a star-studded spacecraft to tell researchers more about their songs, water content, and the system from which they came.

If such an object appears while the Comet Interceptor is in L2, and if an object passes close enough to be visited, then the spacecraft may be sent to cut it instead, giving us unprecedented glimpses of the object from another solar system. “The interstellar-object element is very interesting,” said planetary scientist Geraint Jones of University College London, who led the team that proposed the ESA campaign. “The chances of finding the right interstellar target are slim. But we will always be vigilant.”This is the first time that such an initiative has been launched,” Kueppers said. “We do not expect to have a large number of potential objects. If we have good intentions, we will achieve it.

For more read find the publication link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01696-x

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