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The Halley Armada is the name of a series of space probes, five of which were successful, sent to examine Halley's Comet during its 1986 sojourn through the inner Solar System, connected with apparition "1P/1982 U1". The armada included one probe from the
European Space Agency , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...
, two probes that were joint projects between the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
and
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...
and two probes from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in
Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...
. Notably,
NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedin ...
did not contribute a probe to the Halley Armada.


Main space probes

Probes involved (in order of closest approach): *
Giotto Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto ( , ) and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic/ Proto-Renaissance period. G ...
(596 km), the first space probe to get close-up color images of the nucleus of a comet. (ESA) * Vega 2 (8,030 km), which dropped a balloon probe and lander on
Venus Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never f ...
before going on to Halley. (USSR/France Intercosmos) * Vega 1 (8,889 km), which dropped a balloon probe and lander on Venus before going on to Halley. (USSR/France Intercosmos) * Suisei (151,000 km), also known as PLANET-A. Data from Sakigake was used to improve upon Suisei for its dedicated mission to study Halley. (ISAS) * Sakigake (6.99 million km), Japan's first probe to leave the Earth system, mainly a test of interplanetary mission technology. (ISAS) Without the measurements from the other space probes, Giotto's closest distance would have been 4,000 km instead of the 596 km achieved.


Other missions

Other space probes had their instruments examining Halley's Comet: * Pioneer 7 was launched on August 17, 1966. It was put into heliocentric orbit with a mean distance of 1.1 AU to study the solar magnetic field, the solar wind, and cosmic rays at widely separated points in solar orbit. On 20 March 1986, the spacecraft flew within 12.3 million kilometers of Halley's Comet and monitored the interaction between the cometary hydrogen tail and the solar wind. *
Pioneer Venus Orbiter The Pioneer Venus Orbiter, also known as Pioneer Venus 1 or Pioneer 12, was a mission to Venus conducted by the United States as part of the Pioneer Venus project. Launched in May 1978 atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket, the spacecraft was inserted into ...
in orbit of Venus, was positioned perfectly to take measurements of Halley's Comet during its perihelion February 9, 1986. Its UV-spectrometer observed the water loss when Halley's Comet was difficult to observe from the Earth. * International Cometary Explorer, which was repurposed as a cometary probe in 1982 and visited Comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, transited between the Sun and Halley's Comet in late March 1986 and took measurements.


Failed and cancelled missions

The Space Shuttle ''Challenger'', on its launch on January 28th, 1986, was carrying SPARTAN-203 with the mission to make observations of Halley's Comet.
STS-51L STS-51-L was the 25th mission of the NASA Space Shuttle program and the final flight of Space Shuttle ''Challenger''. Planned as the first Teacher in Space Project flight in addition to observing Halley's Comet for six days and performing a ...
failed to reach orbit, resulting in the total loss of crew and vehicle. That launch failure resulted in the cancellation of dozens of subsequent shuttle missions, including the next scheduled launch,
STS-61-E STS-61-E was a NASA Space Shuttle mission planned to launch on 6 March 1986 using ''Columbia''. It was canceled after the ''Challenger'' disaster. Crew Mission objectives ''Columbia'' was to carry the ASTRO-1 observatory, which would ...
, planned for March 6, 1986, with a payload including the ASTRO-1 observatory, which was intended to make astronomical observations of Halley's Comet.


Presumed observations from space

*Any observations of Halley's Comet made by the crew of
Soyuz T-15 Soyuz T-15 (russian: Союз T-15, ''Union T-15'') was a crewed mission to the Mir and Salyut 7 space stations and was part of the Soyuz programme. It marked the final flight of the Soyuz-T spacecraft, the third generation Soyuz spacecraft, w ...
, which made the first trip to the Mir
space station A space station is a spacecraft capable of supporting a human crew in orbit for an extended period of time, and is therefore a type of space habitat. It lacks major propulsion or landing systems. An orbital station or an orbital space station ...
and the last to
Salyut 7 Salyut 7 (russian: Салют-7; en, Salute 7) (a.k.a. DOS-6, short for Durable Orbital Station) was a space station in low Earth orbit from April 1982 to February 1991. It was first crewed in May 1982 with two crew via Soyuz T-5, and last ...
in March 1986, are unknown.


References


External links


Image of Halley in 1986 by Giotto spacecraft
(ESA Giotto. Archive.org, 27 Sep 2011) {{Planetary defense Soviet space probes European Space Agency space probes NASA space probes Japanese space probes