Welcome to the SWAS Home Page
What's New
June 28, 2005: SWAS Mission To Support Deep Impact
CfA Press Release 05-22 Full Version HERE
"Hibernating" since July 21, 2004, the SWAS mission has been reactivated
to full science operations mode to provide support for the
Deep Impact Mission.
The SWAS spacecraft is healthy and has been taking data on
Comet 9P/Tempel-1 since June 1, 2005 in order to establish the water
production rate of the comet before the July 4 impact.
A plot
showing ground-state water emission observed toward the comet during the period
June 5 - 15, 2005.
SWAS will continue to monitor water emission from the comet through
August 2005.
SWAS is a NASA Small Explorer Project (SMEX) designed to study the chemical composition of
interstellar gas clouds. SWAS was launched into low Earth orbit on December 05, 1998. The primary objective of SWAS
is to survey water, molecular
oxygen, carbon, and isotopic carbon monoxide emission in a variety of
galactic star forming regions. The SWAS Science Operations Center is located
at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
