Giotto mission: Encyclopedia II - Giotto mission - Mission

Giotto mission - Mission

On March 13, 1986, Giotto approached at a 596 kilometre distance from Halley's nucleus.

The spaceprobe "Giotto" from the European Space Agency was designed to study Halley's Comet. The spacecraft was named after the medieval Italian painter Giotto di Bondone. He had observed Halley's Comet in 1301 and was inspired to depict it as the star of Bethlehem in his painting The Christmas Story.

Originally a United States partner probe was planned that would accompany Giotto, but this fell through due to budget cuts at NASA. There were plans to have observation equipment on-board a Space Shuttle in low-Earth orbit around the time of Giotto's fly-by, but they fell through with the Challenger disaster.

The plan then became a cooperative armada of five spaceprobes including Giotto, two from the Soviet Union's Vega program and two from Japan: the Sakigake and Suisei probes. The idea was for Japanese probes and the pre-existing American probe International Cometary Explorer to make long distance measurements, followed by the Russian Vegas which would locate the nucleus, and the resulting information sent back would allow Giotto to precisely target very close to the nucleus. Because Giotto would pass so very close to the nucleus ESA was mostly convinced it would not survive the encounter due to bombardment from the many high speed cometary particles. The coordinated group of probes became known as the Halley Armada.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Mission", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki