Deep Space 1 (DS1) of the NASA New Millennium Program is a spacecraft dedicated to testing its payload of advanced, high risk technologies. Launched on 24 October 1998, three of twelve technologies on board had to work within a few minutes of separation from the carrier rocket for the mission to continue. Read more
The flyby of Comet Borrelly was a great success and returned extremely detailed images of the comet's surface. Such images were of higher resolution than the only previous pictures, of Halley's Comet taken by the Giotto spacecraft. The PEPE instrument reported that the comet's fields were offset from the nucleus. This is believed to be due to emission of jets, which were not distributed evenly across the comet's surface. Read more