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\"Earth is a great place to pick up orbital velocity,\" said Tim Larson, the EPOXI project manager from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. \"This flyby will give our spacecraft a 1.5-kilometer-per-second [3,470 mph] boost, setting us up to get up close and personal with comet Hartley 2.\"<\/p>
EPOXI is an extended mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft. Its name is derived from its two tasked science investigations -- the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI) and the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh). On Nov. 4, 2010, the mission will conduct an extended flyby of Hartley 2 using all three of the spacecraft's instruments (two telescopes with digital color cameras and an infrared spectrometer).<\/p>
The University of Maryland is the Principal Investigator institution. JPL manages EPOXI for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.<\/p>
For information about EPOXI, visit http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/epoxi<\/a> or http:\/\/epoxi.umd.edu\/<\/a>.<\/p><\/div> NASA's Deep Impact\/EPOXI spacecraft will fly past Earth this Sunday (June 27). Mission navigators have tailored this trajectory so the spacecraft can \"hitch a ride\" on Earth's gravity field, which will help propel the mission toward its appointment with comet … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/1205796008215741128-4422131827746098451?l=spacestation-shuttle.blogspot.com\")