NASA officials said Thursday they have found a fix for the blurry vision of the Boulder-built Deep Impact spacecraft, bound for a July 3 collision with Comet Tempel 1.
Image-processing software will be used to sharpen comet photographs sent back to Earth.

The correction, which has been tested on the flawed Deep Impact camera, "essentially restores the performance that we expected at launch," said Rick Grammier, Deep Impact project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The $333 million Deep Impact spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder. It will collide with the comet at 11:52 p.m. MDT July 3.

Shortly after Deep Impact was launched Jan. 12, engineers found a focusing problem in the spacecraft's main camera-telescope, the High Resolution Instrument.

The problem has been traced to a mirror used when the HRI was tested at Ball, the space agency said. While flat at room temperatures, the mirror unexpectedly developed a slight curvature during testing at ultra-cold temperatures. Ball engineers didn't detect the curvature at the time.

"It was a mirror used in the test setup, not part of the instrument itself," said Harold Reitsema, director of program development at Ball. "Because of the curvature in the test mirror, we set the focus (on the HRI) slightly incorrectly."

The HRI was designed to see surface features as small as 6 feet across. But because of the error, the images will be up to four times fuzzier than expected, until corrected.

The July 3 collision could blast an Invesco Field-sized crater in the comet's side, dredging up primordial ices that should help scientists better understand how the solar system formed.


Publication date: 2005-06-10