NASA Develops a Comet Harpoon for Sample Collection - henningliamel

This is a photo of the ballista testbed preparing to fire a prototype harpoon into a bucket of substantial that simulates a comet. [Photo: NASA/Rob Andreoli]

NASA is cooking up something new to serve it research comets, those elusive balls of rock and ice: a cannon-dismissed harpoon. Information technology sounds equal something early Sci-Fi writers came up with before they thought up tractor beams, but it's actually an cunning idea.

Dissimilar planets and moons, comets and asteroids are relatively small objects that move quickly, so landing place on them is pretty much impossible. Even if you were to find an area on one that's large and flat enough to land on, the cosmonaut OR a space probe would about immediately push off the surface again because of the space rock's extremely scummy gravity.

So instead of dealing with an overly complicated landing sequence, why not vindicatory fire a semipermanent-range harpoon to collect subsurface samples?

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration is currently testing the feasibility of using a harpoon with a sestet-foot tall crossbow at the Goddard Distance Flight Center in Maryland. The crossbow is technically a bricole–the sieging weapon (I'm invading your castle) used past the ancient Greeks–made of motortruck springs and one-half-inch-thick steel cable.

NASA's testing rig points down into a 55-gal drum filled with mixtures of sand, rock salt, and ice-skating rink to simulate the surface of a comet. The crossbow setup allows National Aeronautics and Space Administration's scientists to test-provok the harpoon once more and again until they figure out how much launching get-up-and-go they will need to penetrate a variety of show u compositions. It's also pointed downwards so that the scientists don't inadvertently send a harpoon with 1000 pounds of force keister it direct their walls, flying upwards at speeds of 100 feet-per-second.

This is a pic of a prototype harpoon tip (right) and sample compendium sleeping room (left). [Photo: NASA/Rob Andreoli]

The harpoon itself is comprised of two parts that are wholly hollow. The outer shell penetrates the comet with a empty tip that fills with sediment as it digs down. The central section is a taste-collecting bedroom that is planned with a concluding sample room access. Aft the harpoon retrieves its sample, the bedroom retracts from the outer shell–like a sword pulled from its sheath–and returns to the spacecraft by a wire.

Thusly far, this comet harpoon is just a proofread-of-concept that scientists are experimenting with, and in that respect are no planned missions that will use the system. All the same the first space harpoon will be fired some meter in 2022 in the ESA's Rosetta mission to make do a space probe to a comet.

[NASA via Popular Science]