Nasa planning Valentine’s date with a comet

Like two strangers in the night, a US spacecraft and a speeding comet will dash by one another on Valentine’s Day, according to Nasa... and skywatchers are eager to see what happens.

The Stardust-NExT spacecraft will be rapidly snapping pictures of the Tempel 1 comet as they pass at a mere distance of 200 kilometers.

Space experts are curious to see how a trip around the Sun has affected the surface of the Tempel 1, which is about six kilometers wide and travels on an orbit that brings it as close to the Sun as Mars and as far away as Jupiter.

Tempel 1 was last glimpsed in 2005 by Nasa’s Deep Impact mission as the comet was shooting toward the Sun on its five-year orbit between Mars and Jupiter.

Back then the encounter was akin to, say, a boy shoving a girl on the playground to gauge her reaction.

Deep Impact pummelled the comet with a special impactor spacecraft and the material that came out was a surprise to scientists: A cloud of fine powdery material emerged, not the water, ice and dirt that was expected.

Deep Impact also found evidence of ice on the surface of the comet, not just inside it.

Now space experts want to see how the comet has changed after its tour around the scorching Sun.

“Every day we are getting closer and closer and more and more excited about answering some fundamental questions about comets,” said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator at Cornell University.

“Going back for another look at Tempel 1 will provide new insights on how comets work and how they were put together four-and-a-half billion years ago.”

The February 14 meet-up has been a long time coming for Stardust-NExT, or New Exploration of Tempel, Nasa said.

“As of today, the spacecraft is approximately 15.3 million miles away from its encounter,” the US space agency said in a statement.