I know this is OT, but interesting never-the-less:
>
>On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Ed Cannon wrote:
>
>> "CONTOUR Spacecraft Possibly Destroyed, NASA Says"
>> 
>> "... [CONTOUR Mission Director Robert] Farquhar said late Friday that 
>> images from a ground-based telescope of two unknown objects about 250 
>> kilometers apart appeared to be pieces of the comet-chasing craft. He 
>> said more investigation was needed to confirm the suspicion and that a 
>> concerted search effort would continue at least through Monday in the 
>> meantime.  ...
>> 
>> "In a teleconference with reporters Friday evening, Farquhar said the 
>> craft's engines had almost certainly fired and that it was no longer 
>> in Earth orbit."
>> 
>> Source:
>> 
>> http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/contour_telecon_020816.html
>
>
Then, one of ours posted:
>
>As the observer who got the images of the spacecraft, it's certainly a sad
>day for comet research.  Our images (in the following URL) show two trails
>rather than the one expected, so something catastrophic must have happened.  
>Previous spacecraft, like NEAR had two trails as well as the booster was
>ejected, but I guess that was not supposed to happen to CONTOUR.  I wonder
>what the two pieces are?  The spacecraft was at about the -3% of from nominal
>burn location, so the engine burn was completed or nearly so.
>
>http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/contour.html
>http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/Jeff/contour.jpg
>
>The first URL describes the image, the second is the image.  The spacecraft
>is in a very dense star field near the Galactic plane, so in order to see it,
>I subtracted the 2nd image from the first so the first image is the white
>pair, the second is the dark pair and the residual signal from the field
>stars appear as conjoined black/white pairs since they don't perfectly
>subtract out.
>
>Jim Scotti                              
>Lunar & Planetary Laboratory         jscotti@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu 
>University of Arizona                
>Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/    
>
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