A New Mission Could Rendezvous With Halley's Comet In 2061

Halley’s comet captures the imagination in a way that few other astronomical objects do. When it last made its approach toward the Sun (admittedly when this author, who is now middle-aged, was one year old in 1986), humanity responded with a fleet of spacecraft known informally as the “Halley Armada”. Yet, because of the comet’s trajectory, those spacecraft were only able to visit their target for a fleeting few hours, leaving planetary scientists wanting more. Now, a new paper by researchers at Khalifa University and their co-authors, and available in pre-print on arXiv, describes a mission plan that would allow a spacecraft to actually rendezvous with this most well-known comet for the first time ever.

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