Eall goes well, the next decade will prove to be a golden age of cometary exploration. Four missions should rendezvous with comets. One will return the first sample of cometary dust to earth; another will become the first to orbit and land on a comet; a third will blast a hole in its cometary target's surface. And on July 1st, NASA, America's space agency, plans to launch a mission that will, in a rather gentler way, fly past at least two comets over the next five years. This mission, the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR), will carry out the closest flypast of a comet so far. It will head first for comet Encke, coming within 100km of it on November 12th 2003. Next, it will meet comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, on June 19th 2006. With luck, it will then go on to visit a third comet―though which one has yet to be decided.
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