NASA Loses Signal of Contour Craft as It Was to Leave Earth Orbit

WASHINGTON —  NASA lost contact with a $159-million spacecraft Thursday, when the robotic probe was to have left Earth orbit on a years-long journey to explore several comets.

The mission’s operations team was seeking to regain communication with the Contour spacecraft, which was supposed to automatically fire its solid-rocket motor at 1:49 a.m. PDT to boost itself out of the orbit.

At the time, the octagonal spacecraft was about 140 miles above the Indian Ocean and was too close to Earth and moving too fast for NASA’s Deep Space Network of antennas to track it.

The network was to have picked up a signal from Contour 48 minutes after the burn, as the spacecraft moved away from Earth. Instead, it vanished.

The giant dish antennas in California, Australia and Spain continued to search for the spacecraft, alternately sending it commands and listening for a response. Nothing was heard from Contour--short for Comet Nucleus Tour.

“I guess we are still certainly hoping this will turn out all right. Spacecraft have been lost before and safely regained,” said Michael Belton, a member of the mission’s science team.

The mission’s operations team looked for Contour at points along the predicted paths that it was supposed to have taken. If the motor did not fire, Contour would have remained stuck in Earth orbit.

“They are operating on the assumption that the burn went as planned,” said Michael Buckley, a spokesman for Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Johns Hopkins built the spacecraft, with assistance from Cornell University, for NASA.

“There is still some cautious optimism over there,” Buckley added.

The spacecraft had been in Earth orbit since its launch July 3, looping around the planet every 42 hours on an elliptical path.