On November 4, 2010 the Deep Impact spacecraft, operating under the EPOXI mission, made a successful flyby of comet Hartley 2, making it the first probe to visit two comets. The Deep Impact mission was launched by NASA in 2005 to study the internal composition of comet Tempel 1. Its mission was later extended to include Hartley 2 flyby and the data collected showed that the two lobes of Hartley 2 were different in composition.
“Deep Impact has been a fantastic, long-lasting spacecraft that has produced far more data than we had planned,” said Mike A’Hearn, the Deep Impact principal investigator at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It has revolutionized our understanding of comets and their activity.”
Deep Impact successfully completed its original bold mission of six months in 2005 to investigate both the surface and interior composition of a comet, and a subsequent extended mission of another comet flyby and observations of planets around other stars that lasted from July 2007 to December 2010. Since then, the spacecraft has been continually used as a space-borne planetary observatory to capture images and other scientific data on several targets of opportunity with its telescopes and instrumentation.
Picture Credit : Google