Giotto Spacecraft

Anny Chantal Levasseur-Regourd (1)

1 PLANETO - LATMOS

The Giotto spacecraft (Fig. 1), the first ESA (European Space Agency) interplanetary probe, was designed to flyby comet Halley. Launched on 2 July 1985 by an Ariane-1 rocket from Kourou, Giotto succeeded in approaching the cometary nucleus to within 600 km on 14 March 1986. Through its first accurate images of a nucleus and in situ studies of gases and dust particles within a coma, the mission has revealed the complexity of comets. Afterwards, the Giotto spacecraft was re-oriented in order to study comet Grigg-Skjellerup, which was flown by on 10 July 1992, at a nucleus distance in the 150–200 km range.

Keywords: Comet; Nucleus; Coma; Water; Dust; Organics; CHON; Giotto; Giotto extended mission; Spacecraft; ESA; Halley; Grigg-Skjellerup

Domains: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics [astro-ph.EP]

Anny Chantal Levasseur-Regourd. Giotto Spacecraft. Ricardo Amils, Muriel Gargaud, José Cernicharo Quintanilla, Henderson James Cleaves, William M. Irvine, Daniele Pinti, Michel Viso. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 8 p., 2015, ISBN : 978-3-642-27833-4. ⟨10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_648-3⟩. ⟨insu-01161461⟩