Chimera (spacecraft)

Chimera
A Gateway to the Centaurs and the Secrets of Small Body Formation
Mission typeCentaur Orbiter
OperatorNASA
Mission duration>2 years of orbital exploration
Spacecraft properties
ManufacturerLockheed Martin[1]
Start of mission
Launch date2025-2026 (proposed)[1]
Instruments
Visible and Thermal Imagers, mass and infrared spectrometers, radar[1]

Chimera is a NASA mission concept to orbit and explore 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 (SW1), an active, outbursting small icy body in the outer Solar System.[1][2][3][4] The concept was developed in response to the 2019 NASA call for potential missions in the Discovery-class,[5] and it would have been the first spacecraft encounter with a Centaur and the first orbital exploration of a small body in the outer Solar System. The Chimera proposal was ranked in the first tier (Category 1) of submissions, but was not selected for further development for the programmatic reason of maintaining scientific balance.

SW1 is a member of the Centaur group, a population of near-pristine objects that have been gravitationally perturbed from the Kuiper Belt into unstable orbits in the region between Jupiter and Neptune. Many Centaurs eventually migrate into the inner Solar System to become short period, 'Jupiter Family' comets (JFCs),[6] and SW1 is believed to occupy the orbital ‘gateway’ through which they pass as they make this transition.[7] SW1’s characteristics are a chimeric combination of icy small bodies at different points along their evolution from the fringes of the Solar System to active comets passing near the Sun. This provides a unique opportunity to study how these objects formed, are composed, and change over time. Over a more than two year orbital encounter, Chimera would sample the escaping gas coma of SW1, study its patterns of activity and outburst, map the composition and topography of its surface, probe its interior, and monitor for changes as it evolves.

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