Triple F—a comet nucleus sample return mission

Küppers, Michael; Keller, H. U.; Kührt, E.; A'Hearn, M. F.; Altwegg, K.; Bertrand, R.; Busemann, H.; Capria, M. T.; Colangeli, L.; Davidsson, B.; Ehrenfreund, P.; Knollenberg, J.; Mottola, S.; Rathke, A.; Weiss, P.; Zolensky, M.; Akim, E.; Basilevsky, A.; Galimov, E.; Gerasimov, M.; Korablev, O.; Lomakin, I.; Marov, M.; Martynov, M.; Nazarov, M.; Zakharov, A.; Zelenyi, L.; Aronica, A.; Ball, A. J.; Barbieri, C.; Bar-Nun, A.; Benkhoff, J.; Biele, J.; Biver, N.; Blum, J.; Bockelée-Morvan, D.; Botta, O.; Bredehöft, J.-H.; Capaccioni, F.; Charnley, S.; Cloutis, E.; Cottin, H.; Cremonese, G.; Crovisier, J.; Crowther, S. A.; Epifani, E. M.; Esposito, F.; Ferrari, A. C.; Ferri, F.; Fulle, M.; Gilmour, J.; Goesmann, F.; Gortsas, N.; Green, S. F.; Groussin, O.; Grün, E.; Gutiérrez, P. J.; Hartogh, P.; Henkel, T.; Hilchenbach, M.; Ho, T.-M.; Horneck, G.; Hviid, S. F.; Ip, W.-H.; Jäckel, A.; Jessberger, E.; Kallenbach, R.; Kargl, G.; Kömle, N. I.; Korth, A.; Kossacki, K.; Krause, C.; Krüger, H.; Li, Z.-Y.; Licandro, J.; Lopez-Moreno, J. J.; Lowry, S. C.; Lyon, I.; Magni, G.; Mall, U.; Mann, I.; Markiewicz, W.; Martins, Z.; Maurette, M.; Meierhenrich, U.; Mennella, V.; Ng, T. C.; Nittler, L. R.; Palumbo, P.; Pätzold, M.; Prialnik, D.; Rengel, M.; Rickman, H.; Rodriguez, J.; Roll, R.; Rost, D.; Rotundi, A.; Sandford, S.; Schönbächler, M.; Sierks, H. et al.
Bibliographical reference

Experimental Astronomy, Volume 23, Issue 3, pp.809-847

Advertised on:
3
2009
Number of authors
112
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
11
Refereed citations
9
Description
The Triple F ( Fresh From the Fridge) mission, a Comet Nucleus Sample Return, has been proposed to ESA’s Cosmic Vision program. A sample return from a comet enables us to reach the ultimate goal of cometary research. Since comets are the least processed bodies in the solar system, the proposal goes far beyond cometary science topics (like the explanation of cometary activity) and delivers invaluable information about the formation of the solar system and the interstellar molecular cloud from which it formed. The proposed mission would extract three sample cores of the upper 50 cm from three locations on a cometary nucleus and return them cooled to Earth for analysis in the laboratory. The simple mission concept with a touch-and-go sampling by a single spacecraft was proposed as an M-class mission in collaboration with the Russian space agency ROSCOSMOS.
Related projects
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Minor Bodies of the Solar System
This project studies the physical and compositional properties of the so-called minor bodies of the Solar System, that includes asteroids, icy objects, and comets. Of special interest are the trans-neptunian objects (TNOs), including those considered the most distant objects detected so far (Extreme-TNOs or ETNOs); the comets and the comet-asteroid
Julia de
León Cruz