Martin Zeller
Manager, Knowledge Resources
ETTC
NASA has announced the selection of a new Discovery Program mission to explore the interior of a comet. The $240 million mission will be managed by Jet Propulsion Laboratory. USC's School of Engineering Technology Transfer Center, through its NASA Far West RTTC program, will serve as JPL's commercialization partner for Deep Impact, the agent through which mission technologies with commercial potential are identified, assessed and ultimately transferred to the commercial sector.
Deep Impact will be launched in January 2004 and will meet Comet P/Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005 in an explosive impact that will carve a crater as large as a football field and as deep as a seven story building. Built by Ball Aerospace, the Deep Impact spacecraft is an 1,100 pound copper projectile carrying a camera and infrared spectrometer to study the icy debris blasted from the surface of the comet and the pristine interior material uncovered by the impact.
Messenger, a second Discovery mission announced last week, will travel to Mercury to collect the first global images of the planet and study its shape, interior and magnetic field. Messenger is managed by NASA's Langley Research Center. The Mid-Atlantic Technology Applications Center (MTAC) at the University of Pittsburgh, the Mid-Atlantic region RTTC, will provide technology infusion and commercialization services to the Messenger mission.
NASA selected Deep Impact and Messenger from 26 proposals made in early 1998. The missions must be ready for launch no later than Sept. 30, 2004, within the Discovery Program's development cost cap of $190 million in fiscal 1999 dollars over 36 months and a total mission cost of $299 million. The Discovery Program emphasizes lower- cost, highly focused scientific missions.
The Far West RTTC is also JPL's commercialization partner for Stardust, another Discovery Program mission launched in 1999. Stardust will travel to comet Wild 2 and, in a close encounter in January 2004, will collect samples of cometary material and return them to earth for study.
For further information contact Martin Zeller at 213-743-2927 or zeller@usc.edu.
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