A Six-Minute Journey to Study Comet ISON

UPDATE: The FORTIS launch to observe Comet ISON has been rescheduled for the morning of Nov. 20, 2013. A technical issue with the payload resulted in postponing the launch this morning at the White Sands Missile Range in N.M.

In an example of an extremely tight turnaround, a NASA-funded team has spent six months preparing for a mid-November launch to observe Comet ISON during a six-minute sounding rocket flight. The Far-ultraviolet Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy, or FORTIS, was originally designed – and flew for the first time in May 2013 -- to measure the presence of different atoms in far away galaxies. However, the telescope happens to also be well-tuned to study carbon monoxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and other interesting atoms expected on Come ISON as well, so the team sought funding from NASA to quickly launch it again.

"FORTIS took its first flight in May," said Stephan McCandliss, the Fortis Principal Investigator at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. "We knew we were going to rebuild the instrument and fly it again, regardless – it was just a question of how fast. When our proposal to use FORTIS to look at ISON in November was accepted, we started working our tails off."

Catalogued as C/2012 S1, Comet ISON was first spotted 585 million miles away in September 2012 and it is now travelling toward the sun at a whopping 48,000 mph. The comet will make its closest approach to the sun on Nov. 28, 2013. This is the comet's very first trip around the sun. It is thought to be made of pristine matter from the earliest days of the solar system’s formation, its top layers never having been lost by a trip near the sun. Scientists have been pointing as many ground-based observatories as they can and at least 15 space-based assets towards the comet along the way, in order to learn more about this time capsule from when the solar system first formed.

FULL STORY: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/six-minute-journey-to-study-com...