Halley Armada - Other Space Probes

Other Space Probes

Other space probes had their instruments examining Halley's Comet:

• Pioneer 7 was Launched on August 17, 1966. It was put into heliocentric orbit with a mean distance of 1.1 AU to study the solar magnetic field, the solar wind, and cosmic rays at widely separated points in solar orbit. On 20 March 1986, the spacecraft flew within 12.3 million kilometers of Halley's Comet and monitored the interaction between the cometary hydrogen tail and the solar wind.

• Pioneer Venus Orbiter in orbit of Venus, was positioned perfectly to take measurements of Halley's Comet during its perihelion February 9, 1986. Its UV-spectrometer observed the water loss when Halley's Comet was difficult to observe from the Earth.

• International Cometary Explorer, which was repurposed as a cometary probe in 1982 and visited Comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, transited between the Sun and Halley's Comet in late March 1986 and took measurements.