The Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) mission suffered a devastating loss last month when their spacecraft fell silent. The disappearance certainly affects the work of the CONTOUR researchers, but how will the spacecraft's status shape the plans of CONTOUR Comet Challenge winners?

Earlier this year, a public outreach effort called the CONTOUR Comet Challenge encouraged teams of one teacher and one student to develop projects that would share their interest in comets and newfound knowledge about CONTOUR with their communities. Four winning teams received outreach materials and traveled to Cape Canaveral to view the launch of the CONTOUR spacecraft. Each team also received $1,000 to implement its project after the launch.

The loss of the spacecraft affected the morale more than the research of one winning project, "Rural Space Science Challenge."

"The fact that we met the people involved in this mission makes its loss more strongly felt," relays Chris Peterson, a science teacher at Guffey Community Charter School in Colorado. "We were very close to the project, and even imaged the spacecraft in its final orbit before the burn that was to take it to Comet Encke."

Peterson and his former student Matthew Smith still plan to present a series of talks in their rural area and at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. With the loss of CONTOUR, the details of their talks will change somewhat, but rather than focusing heavily on the CONTOUR mission and its instrumentation, they will concentrate on comets in general and what scientists hope to learn from them.

Now that Peterson and Smith are unable to rely on CONTOUR's instrumentation for information as initially planned, they hope to rely on the CONTOUR team instead.

"Although no data from the CIDA (Comet Impact Dust Analyzer) instrument will be received, I have established a good relationship with a principal investigator for the CIDA, and no doubt that will prove a valuable resource in the future," Peterson explains.

"Cool Comets," a project by student Andrea Sease and instructor Marilou Bebak of the Nardin Academy High School in Buffalo, New York, has been affected only slightly by CONTOUR's disappearance. They're planning a presentation for the Buffalo Museum of Science, where both work part-time. Tied in with the museum's Winter Wonderland program, Sease and Bebak's focus will be on comets as "dirty snowballs." With a hands-on display, workshops, and a PowerPoint presentation, their goal is to educate the public on comets' make-up, solar interaction, and orbital paths.

"I had actually finished the PowerPoint presentation before I learned the spacecraft was lost," Sease says.

For "Cool Comets," CONTOUR was to serve primarily as a public awareness tool.

"After people come to the museum, see our presentation and become excited about comets as cool things, my hope was that they would look in the press for news about the CONTOUR mission as it came out," says Bebak. "I was looking for CONTOUR to make people more aware of the importance of space exploration."

Although an important spacecraft vanished, along with the potential for valuable discoveries, Bebak is quick to point out a valuable lesson.

"Unfortunately, people get the impression that everything must work perfectly or the knowledge isn't valuable. Science doesn't work like that. It's as I always tell my students, we learn from our mistakes."

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