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 1 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, available on the arXiv preprint server, describes a mission plan that would allow a spacecraft to rendezvous with this best-known comet for the first time.

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