Comet Interceptor
ESA mission to intercept a long-period comet from L2.
The European Space Agency's Comet Interceptor is a robotic probe set to launch between August 2028 and July 2029. It will loiter at the Sun-Earth L2 point for up to three years, awaiting a long-period comet on a suitable flyby path. Its goal is to study a pristine comet's surface shape, structure, composition, and gas coma.
Quick Facts
- Operator
- ESA; JAXA
- Launch mass
- ~850 kg / 1,874 lb.
- Launched
- 2028–2029 (planned)snews1
- Launch rocket
- Ariane 62
- Launch site
- Kourou ELA-4
- Launch contractor
- Arianespace
- Insignia upright
- 0.6
- Insignia caption
- ESA insignia
Facts from the source article.
Background
Comet Interceptor marks the first Fast-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision programme, with a consortium led by ESA and JAXA handling its planning and development. It will hitch a ride to Lagrange point 2 alongside ESA's ARIEL space telescope. The mission's principal investigator is Geraint Jones from the UK's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. The spacecraft bus is budgeted at a maximum of €150 million, not counting science instruments or launch costs.
Overview
Long-period comets have highly eccentric orbits with periods from 200 years to millions of years, often discovered only months before passing through the inner Solar System. ESA will park Comet Interceptor on a stable halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point and wait for a suitable comet to become reachable. The mission is designed to encounter an as-yet unknown target, waiting two to three years for a comet it can reach with reasonable delta-v within a total mission length of about five years. A bi-propellant chemical propulsion system provides the required impulse. Ground-based surveys such as Pan-STARRS, ATLAS, or the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory's LSST will identify candidate comets, which must be about 0.85–1.2 AU from the Sun during approach. If no long-period comet is intercepted in time, a backup short-period comet (baseline: 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann) can be studied. There is also potential to intercept an interstellar object if speed and direction permit.
Timeline
Comet Interceptor became an ESA Fast-class mission in 2019, and the agency’s Science Programme Committee formally adopted it in June 2022. Later that year, in December, ESA and OHB signed a contract to begin designing and building the spacecraft. The Estonian Space Office backed development of the OPIC camera system, created by the University of Tartu, in 2023. MMA Space was chosen in September 2024 to supply solar panels for Probe B1. That July, the magnetometer boom underwent vibration testing, and by November 2024, Probe B2’s structural qualification model had passed all mechanical checks. In December 2024, OHB Czechspace in Brno put together a dust shield test article and sent it to IABG facilities in Germany. In May 2025, ESA got photorealistic computer-generated images from Latvia’s CI3D project for camera testing, and Redwire Corporation delivered the flight computer. In May 2026, SENER received the first flight models of the Dust Field & Plasma instruments for Probe B2 from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
More in Space Probes of ESA, Japan, China, India and the USSR
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