Description
ESA's Comet Interceptor will launch to the Sun-Earth L2 point in 2029, where it will be 'parked' in a stable L2 halo orbit for a period of up to 2-3 years, until a suitable opportunity for a flyby mission to an Oort Cloud comet presents itself. Shortly before the flyby, the main spacecraft will deploy 2 small probes (one provided by JAXA, one by ESA) allowing multiple paths through the coma and past the nucleus to be sampled. This will give a 3D snapshot of the comet at the time of the flyby, testing spatial inhomogeneity in the coma and interaction with the solar wind on all scales. This will be a unique measurement that was not possible with Rosetta, in addition to the fact that we will target a new class of comet (a much less evolved body), which will allow interesting comparisons to be made with the results from 67P. The spacecraft will have a high resolution camera to take images at up to 10m/pix resolution, a mass spectrometer based on Rosetta/ROSINA heritage, an infrared remote sensing camera/spectrograph, including the first thermal infrared camera sent to a comet, a package of dust, fields and plasma sensors, and, on the small probes, additional UV and visible cameras, including an all-sky scanning polarimeter to reveal dust properties.
