Spacecraft Design
The CONTOUR spacecraft had a total fueled mass of 775 kg, including 70 kg of hydrazine fuel and a Star 30BP booster with a mass of 377 kg. Power was provided by a body-mounted solar array designed for operation at distances between 0.75 and 1.5 AU from the Sun. It was three-axis stabilized for encounters and spin-stabilized during cruise mode between encounters.
COUNTOUR's Command/Data-handling and Guidance/Control computers both used the Mongoose-V microprocessor. Communications were through a fixed 0.45 m diameter high-gain antenna designed to support data rates greater than 100 kbit/s at encounters. Data and images were stored on two 3.3 Gbit solid-state recorders with a capacity of 600 images.
The spacecraft was equipped with four primary science instruments: the Contour Remote Imager/Spectrograph (CRISP), the Contour Aft Imager (CAI), the Dust Analyzer (CIDA), and the Neutral Gas Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS).
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