The latter half of the 20th century saw a massive leap forward in the understanding of the solar system as a result of spacecraft visits to the planets and their satellites. Those spacecraft collected a wealth of scientific data close up and in situ. The anticipated return of Halley’s Comet in 1986 provided substantial motivation to begin using spacecraft to study comets.

The first comet mission (of a sort) was the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) spacecraft’s encounter with Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner on September 11, 1985. The mission had originally been launched as part of a joint project by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) known as the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE). The mission consisted of three spacecraft, two of them, ISEE-1 and -2, in Earth orbit and the third, ISEE-3, positioned in a heliocentric orbit between Earth and the Sun, studying the solar wind in Earth’s vicinity.

In 1982 and 1983 engineers maneuvered ISEE-3 to accomplish several gravity-assist encounters with the Moon, which put it on a trajectory to encounter 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. The spacecraft was targeted to pass through the ion tail of the comet, about 7,800 km (4,800 miles) behind the nucleus at a relative velocity of 21 km (13 miles) per second, and returned the first in situ measurements of the magnetic field, plasma, and energetic particle environment inside a comet’s tail. Those measurements confirmed the model of the comet’s ion tail first put forward in 1957 by the Swedish physicist (and later Nobel Prize winner) Hannes Alfvén. It also showed that H₂O⁺ was the most common ion in the plasma tail, consistent with the Whipple model of an icy conglomerate nucleus. However, ICE carried no instruments to study the nucleus or coma of the comet.

In 1986 five spacecraft were sent to encounter Halley’s Comet. They were informally known as the Halley Armada and consisted of two Japanese spacecraft, Suisei and Sakigake (Japanese for “comet” and “pioneer,” respectively); two Soviet spacecraft, Vega 1 and 2 (a contraction of Venus-Halley using Cyrillic spelling); and an ESA spacecraft, Giotto (named after the Italian painter who depicted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet in a fresco painted in 1305–06).

Suisei flew by Halley on March 8, 1986, at a distance of 151,000 km (94,000 miles) on the sunward side and produced ultraviolet images of the comet’s hydrogen corona, an extension of the visible coma seen only in ultraviolet light. It also measured the energetic particle environment in the solar wind ahead of the comet. Sakigake’s closest approach to the comet was on March 11, 1986, at a distance of 6.99 million km (4.34 million miles), and it made additional measurements of the solar wind.

More From Britannica

solar system: Asteroids and comets

Before flying past Halley’s Comet, the two Soviet spacecraft had flown by Venus and had each dropped off landers and balloons to study that planet. Vega 1 flew through the Halley coma on March 6, 1986, to within 8,889 km (5,523 miles) of the nucleus and made numerous measurements of the coma gas and dust composition, plasma and energetic particles, and magnetic field environment. It also returned the first picture ever of a solid cometary nucleus. Unfortunately, the camera was slightly out of focus and had other technical problems that required considerable image processing to see the nucleus. Vega 2 fared much better when it flew through the Halley coma on March 9 to within 8,030 km (4,990 miles) of the nucleus, and its images clearly showed a peanut-shaped nucleus about 16 by 8 km (10 by 5 miles) in diameter. The nucleus was also very dark, reflecting only about 4 percent of the incident sunlight, which had already been established from Earth-based observations.

Both Vega spacecraft carried infrared spectrometers designed to measure the temperature of the Halley nucleus. They found quite warm temperatures between 320 and 400 K (47 and 127 °C [116 and 260 °F]). That surprised many scientists who had predicted that the effect of water ice sublimation would be to cool the nucleus’s surface; water ice requires a great deal of heat to sublimate. The high temperatures suggested that much of the nucleus’s surface was not sublimating, but why?

Whipple’s classic paper in 1950 had suggested that as comets lost material from the surface, some particles were too heavy to escape the weak gravity of the nucleus and fell back onto the surface, forming a lag deposit. That idea was later studied by American astronomer and author David Brin in his thesis work with his adviser, Sri Lankan physicist Asoka Mendis, in 1979. As the lag deposit built up, it would effectively insulate the icy materials below it from sunlight. Calculations showed that a layer only 10–100 cm (4–39 inches) in thickness could completely turn off sublimation from the surface. Brin and Mendis predicted that Halley would be so active that it would blow away any lag deposit, but that was not the case. Only about 30 percent of Halley’s sunlit hemisphere was active. Bright dust jets could be seen coming from specific areas on the nucleus surface, but much of the surface showed no visible activity.

Giotto flew through Halley’s coma on March 14, 1986, and passed only 596 km (370 miles) from the nucleus. It returned the highest-resolution images of the nucleus and showed a very rugged terrain with “mountain peaks” jutting up hundreds of metres from the surface. It also showed the same peanut shape that Vega 2 saw but from a different viewing angle and with much greater visible detail. Discrete dust jets were coming off the nucleus surface, but the resolution was not good enough to reveal the source of the jets.

Giotto and both Vega spacecraft obtained numerous measurements of the dust and gas in the coma. Dust particles came in two types: silicate and organic. The silicate grains were typical of rocks found on Earth such as forsterite (Mg₂SiO₄), a high-temperature mineral—that is, one which would be among the first to condense out of the hot solar nebula. Analyses of other grains showed that the comet was far richer in magnesium relative to iron. The organic grains were composed solely of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and were called CHON grains based on the chemical symbol for each of those elements. Larger grains were also detected that were combinations of silicate and CHON grains, supporting the view that comet nuclei had accreted from the slow aggregation of tiny particles in the solar nebula.

The three spacecraft also measured gases in the coma, water being the dominant molecule but also carbon monoxide accounting for about 7 percent of the gas relative to water. Formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide were also detected at a few percent relative to water.

The Halley Armada was a rousing success and resulted from international cooperation by many nations. Its success is even more impressive when one considers that the spacecraft all flew by the Halley nucleus at velocities ranging from 68 to 79 km per second (152,000 to 177,000 miles per hour). (The velocities were so high because Halley’s retrograde orbit had it going around the Sun in the opposite direction from the spacecraft.)

Giotto was later retargeted using assists from Earth’s gravity to pass within about 200 km (120 miles) of the nucleus of the comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellrup. The flyby was successful, but some of the scientific instruments, including the camera, were no longer working after being sandblasted at Halley.

The next comet mission was not until 1998, when NASA launched Deep Space 1, a spacecraft designed to test a variety of new technologies. After flying past the asteroid 9969 Braille in 1999, Deep Space 1 was retargeted to fly past the comet 19P/Borrelly on September 22, 2001. Images of the Borrelly nucleus showed it to be shaped like a bowling pin, with very rugged terrain on parts of its surface and mesa-like formations over a large area of it. Individual dust and gas jets were seen emanating from the surface, but the activity was far less than that of Halley’s Comet.

The NASA Stardust mission was launched in 1999 with the goal of collecting samples of dust from the coma of Comet 81P/Wild 2. At a flyby speed of 6.1 km per second (13,600 miles per hour), the dust samples would be completely destroyed by impact with a hard collector. Therefore, Stardust used a material made of silica (sand) called aerogel that had a very low density, approaching that of air. The idea was that the aerogel would slow the dust particles without destroying them, much as a detective might shoot a bullet into a box full of cotton in order to collect the undamaged bullet. It worked, and thousands of fine dust particles were returned to Earth in 2006. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the sample contained high-temperature materials that must have formed much closer to the Sun than where the comets formed in the outer solar system. That unexpected result meant that material in the solar nebula had been mixed, at least from the inside outward, during the formation of the planets.

Stardust’s images of the nucleus of Wild 2 showed a surface that was radically different from either Halley or Borrelly. The surface appeared to be covered with large flat-floored depressions. Those were likely not impact craters, as they did not have the correct morphology and there were far too many large ones. There was some suggestion that it was a very “new” cometary surface on a nucleus that had not been close to the Sun before. Support for that was the fact that Wild 2 had been placed into its current orbit by a close Jupiter approach in 1974, reducing the perihelion distance to about 1.5 AU (224 million km, or 139 million miles). Before the Jupiter encounter, its perihelion was 4.9 AU (733 million km, or 455 million miles), beyond the region where water ice sublimation is significant.

In 2002 NASA launched a mission called Contour (Comet Nucleus Tour) that was to fly by Encke’s Comet and 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 and possibly continue on to 6P/D’Arrest. Unfortunately, the spacecraft structure failed when leaving Earth orbit.

In 2005 NASA launched yet another comet mission, called Deep Impact. It consisted of two spacecraft, a mother spacecraft that would fly by Comet 9P/Tempel 1 and a daughter spacecraft that would be deliberately crashed into the comet nucleus. The mother spacecraft would take images of the impact. The daughter spacecraft contained its own camera system to image the nucleus surface up to the moment of impact. To maximize the effect of the impact, the daughter spacecraft contained 360 kg (794 pounds) of solid copper. The predicted impact energy was equivalent to 4.8 tonnes of TNT.

The two spacecraft encountered Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. The impactor produced the highest-resolution pictures of a nucleus surface ever, imaging details less than 10 metres (33 feet) in size. The mother spacecraft watched the explosion and saw a huge cloud of dust and gas emitted from the nucleus. One of the mission goals was to image the crater made by the explosion, but the dust cloud was so thick that the nucleus surface could not be seen through it. Because the mission was a flyby, the mother spacecraft could not wait around for the dust to clear.

Images of the Tempel 1 nucleus were very different from what had been seen before. The surface appeared to be old, with examples of “geologic” processes having occurred. There was evidence of dust flows across the nucleus surface and what appeared to be two modest-sized impact craters. There was evidence of material having been eroded away. For the first time, icy patches were discovered in some small areas of the nucleus surface.

For the first time, a mission was also able to measure the mass and density of a cometary nucleus. Typically, the nuclei are too small and their gravity too weak to affect the trajectory of the flyby spacecraft. The same was true for Tempel 1, but observations of the expanding dust cloud from the impact could be modeled so as to solve for the nucleus gravity. When combined with the volume of the nucleus as obtained from the camera images, it was shown that the Tempel 1 nucleus had a bulk density between 0.2 and 1.0 gram per cubic centimetre with a preferred value of 0.4 gram per cubic centimetre, less than half that of water ice. The measurement clearly confirmed ideas from telescopic research that comets were not very dense.

After the great success of Stardust and Deep Impact, NASA had additional plans for the spacecraft. Stardust was retargeted to go to Tempel 1 and image the crater from the Deep Impact explosion as well as more of the nucleus surface not seen on the first flyby. Deep Impact was retargeted to fly past 103P/Hartley 2, a small but very active comet.

Deep Impact, in its postimpact EPOXI mission, flew past Comet Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. It imaged a small nucleus about 2.3 km (1.4 miles) in length and 0.9 km (0.6 mile) wide. As with Halley and Borrelly, the nucleus appeared to be two bodies stuck together, each having rough terrain but covered with very fine, smooth material at the “neck” where they came together. The most amazing result was that the smaller of the two bodies making up the nucleus was far more active than the larger one. The activity on the smaller body appeared to be driven by CO₂ sublimation—an unexpected result, given that short-period comets are expected to lose their near-surface CO₂ early during their many passages close to the Sun. The other half of the nucleus was far less active and only showed evidence of water ice sublimation. The active half of the comet also appeared to be flinging baseball- to basketball-sized chunks of water ice into the coma, further enhancing the gas production from the comet as they sublimated away.

The EPOXI images also showed that the nucleus was not rotating smoothly but was in complex rotation—a state where the comet nucleus rotates but the direction of the rotation pole precesses rapidly, drawing a large circle on the sky. Hartley 2 was the first encountered comet to exhibit complex rotation. It was likely driven by the very high activity from the smaller half of the nucleus, putting large torques on the nucleus rotation.

Stardust/NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1) flew past Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011, and it imaged the spot where the Deep Impact daughter spacecraft had struck the nucleus. Some scientists believed that they saw evidence of a crater about 150 metres (500 feet) in diameter, but other scientists looked at the same images and saw no clear evidence of a crater. Some of the ambiguity was due to the fact that the Stardust camera was not as sharp as the Deep Impact cameras, and some of it was also due to the fact that sunlight was illuminating the nucleus from a different direction. The debate over whether there was a recognizable crater lingers on.

Among the new areas observed by Stardust-NeXT there was further evidence of geologic processes, including layered terrains. Using stereographic imaging, the scientists traced dust jets observed in the coma back to the nucleus surface, and they appeared to originate from some of the layered terrain. Again, the resolution of the images was not good enough to understand why the jets were coming from that area.

In 2004 ESA launched Rosetta (named after the Rosetta Stone, which had unlocked the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics) on a trajectory to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). Rendezvous with 67P took place on August 6, 2014. Along the way, Rosetta successfully flew by the asteroids 2849 Steins and 21 Lutetia and obtained considerable scientific data. Rosetta uses 11 scientific instruments to study the nucleus, coma, and solar wind interaction. Unlike previous comet missions, Rosetta will orbit the nucleus until December 2015, providing a complete view of the comet as activity begins, reaches a maximum at perihelion, and then wanes. Rosetta carried a spacecraft called Philae that landed on the nucleus surface on November 12, 2014. Philae drilled into the nucleus surface to collect samples of the nucleus and analyze them in situ. As the first mission to orbit and land on a cometary nucleus, Rosetta is expected to answer many questions about the sources of cometary activity.