Comet Rendezvous, Sample Acquisition, Investigation, and Return (CORSAIR) is a concept mission to return comet nucleus samples to Earth for detailed analysis. The mission concept was submitted in May 2017 by a team from NASA's

Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC empl ...

in response to the

New Frontiers program The New Frontiers program is a series of space exploration missions being conducted by NASA with the purpose of furthering the understanding of the Solar System. The program selects medium-class missions which can provide high science returns. ...

call for mission 4, but did not pass the initial down selection. As a comet sample return mission was not ultimately selected for mission 4 (

Dragonfly A dragonfly is a flying insect belonging to the infraorder Anisoptera below the order Odonata. About 3,000 extant species of true dragonfly are known. Most are tropical, with fewer species in temperate regions. Loss of wetland habitat threate ...

, a Titan probe was selected), the CORSAIR team may re-submit the concept to a future New Frontiers program call.

Objectives

The CORSAIR goal is understanding the role of comets as ingredients for planets and life.CORSAIR (COmet Rendezvous, Sample Acquisition, Investigation, and Return): A New Frontiers Mission Concept to Collect Samples from a Comet and Return them to Earth for Study
(PDF). S. A. Sandford, N. L. Chabot, N. Dello Russo, J. C. Leary, E. L. Reynolds, H. A. Weaver, D. H. Wooden. 80th Annual Meeting of the Meteoritical Society 2017 (LPI Contrib. No. 1987). If selected for development, CORSAIR would rendezvous with comet 88P/Howell for approximately 140 days to perform detailed physical and chemical characterization and return to Earth with comet samples of the

nucleus Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to: *Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom *Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA Nucle ...

and its

coma A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhi ...

. If selected for development, the mission would have launched on 2024, cruise to the comet would take 7 years, including two Earth

gravity assist In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by is the use of the relative movement (e.g. orbit around the Sun) and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to alter the p ...

s. Rendezvous with the 88P/Howell would happen in May 2031 and the interactions would last up to 294 days. The return trip to Earth would take about 4.3 years.

Scientific payload

CORSAIR's conceptual scientific payload include: * CORSAIR Dual Imaging System (CorDIS), for near and wide angle imaging of the nucleus surface * Coma Dust Sampler (CDS) a Japanese-contributed coma dust flux monitoring and coma dust sampling system * CORSAIR Altimetric Laser (CorAL), a copy of the

OSIRIS-REx OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) is a NASA asteroid-study and sample-return mission. The mission's primary goal is to obtain a sample of at least from 101955 Bennu, a carbonac ...

/OLA instrument for sample site topography and near-comet navigation * CORSAIR THermal EMission Imaging System (C-THEMIS): a ''Mars Odyssey''-heritage instrument for characterization of thermal inertia and mineralogical variability on the nucleus surface * CORSAIR Mass Spectrometer (C-MaSt), a Swiss contribution from Rosetta/ROSINA heritage for coma and volatile measurements * Proximity Cameras (ProxCams), are replicas of the

TagCams for near comet navigation and imaging of the sampling events * Radio Science (RS), and onboard communications system to determine comet nucleus mass Surface samples would be obtained with the use of a harpoon-like penetrator.Triangular Rollable And Collapsible Boom (TRACTM Boom)
NASA SBIR 2016 Solicitation, Proposal Nbr. 16-2 Z4.01-7700.

Objectives

Scientific payload

See also