WASHINGTON, DC – NASA's EPOXI mission spacecraft successfully flew past comet Hartley 2 Thursday morning, and scientists say initial images from the flyby provide new information about the comet's volume and material spewing from its surface.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said images taken and other science collected should help reveal new insights into the origins of the solar system as scientists pore over them in the months and years to come.

“This mission represents one of NASA's most successful deep space exploration projects,” Bolden said.

Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said of the flyby, “This was really an exploration moment, seeing something no one on Earth had ever seen before.”

EPOXI principal investigator Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park, said early observations of the comet show that, for the first time, scientists may be able to connect activity to individual features on the nucleus.

“We certainly have our hands full. The images are full of great cometary data, and that's what we hoped for,” A'Hearn said.

EPOXI is an extended mission that uses the already in-flight Deep Impact spacecraft. Its encounter phase with Hartley 2 began at 4 p.m. EDT on Nov. 3, when the spacecraft began to point its two imagers at the comet's nucleus. Imaging of the nucleus began one hour later.

The comet zoomed past the spacecraft at a relative speed of more than 27,000 miles per hour, NASA reported.

“The spacecraft has provided the most extensive observations of a comet in history,” said Weiler. “Scientists and engineers have successfully squeezed world class science from a re-purposed spacecraft at a fraction of the cost to taxpayers of a new science project.”

Images from the EPOXI mission reveal comet Hartley 2 to have 100 times less volume than comet Tempel 1, the first target of Deep Impact. More revelations about Hartley 2 are expected as analysis continues.

Initial estimates indicate the spacecraft was about 435 miles from the comet at the closest-approach point. That's almost the exact distance that was calculated by engineers in advance of the flyby.

“It is a testament to our team's skill that we nailed the flyby distance to a comet that likes to move around the sky so much,” said Tim Larson, EPOXI project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “While it's great to see the images coming down, there is still work to be done. We have another three weeks of imaging during our outbound journey.”

Said Bolden, “EPOXI is a wonderful example of the strong collection of NASA science missions we have coming up in the next few years that will enable us to visit destinations across the solar system in new and exciting ways, look through new windows out across our vast cosmos, and expand our understanding of our own home planet. Our increased investment in science will continue to yield valuable dividends for the future.”

The name EPOXI is a combination of the names for the two extended mission components: the Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh), and the flyby of comet Hartley 2, called the Deep Impact Extended Investigation (DIXI).

The spacecraft has retained the name Deep Impact. In 2005, Deep Impact successfully released an impactor into the path of comet Tempel 1.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the EPOXI mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo.

Follow Lake County News on Twitter at http://twitter.com/LakeCoNews , on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lake-County-News/143156775604?ref=mf and on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/LakeCoNews .