University of hawaii astronomers and colleagues from around the world have searched in vain for a missing comet that was supposed to appear by October. The cosmic mystery forced the rescheduling of NASA's Extrasolar Planet Observation and Deep Impact mission to the comet 85P/Boethin. The EPOXI mission will now go to a different comet. "We were astonished when it wasn't there," said UH astronomer Karen Meech, who led the effort to try to find Boethin. The Subaru 9-meter telescope and 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, both with sensitive wide-field cameras, joined observatories worldwide in the futile hunt for 1-mile-long, half-mile-wide Boethin. Although there is a chance Boethin could be observed next fall, astronomers needed to find it now to put the Deep Impact spacecraft on the right trajectory, Meech said. Comet Hartley 2, Boethin's substitute for the $40 million mission, is just as interesting scientifically, said Tom Duxbury, EPOXI project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But it will take two years longer to reach, he said. Meech said astronomers do not know what happened to comet Boethin. It is a mystery astronomers could solve next fall when the comet approaches the sun, develops a tail and gets bright, she said in an e-mail. "It could be so far off the expected position that we didn't search far enough," Meech said, "but if that is the case, something was very unusual about the way this comet behaves." If the missing comet is located next fall and is far off track, astronomers will try to understand why, she said.

A more likely possibility is that something caused Boethin to break apart and disintegrate, Meech said. Boethin was discovered in 1975 and was closest to the sun in 1997, she said. It was not observed then because it was in the sky only in daylight, but it was seen in 1986, she said. Meech was a member of the Deep Impact Science Team that planned a 2005 NASA mission that sent an 815-pound impactor crashing into Comet Tempel 1 from the spacecraft.

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It will plunge into the South China Sea on Sunday January 25th, 2009

its behind the couch

or its crashed into something

...the Deep Impact mission was years ago...

* edit * oops looks like they have the main body of the probe continuing about the solar system, getting to another comet. Nevermind!

This IS a pretty small comet, faint and hard to see, if it goes far out in the outer solar system an encounter with another body could push its trajectory off, or it could have fragmented like they said. I suspect as it or its pieces get closer to the sun and start to puff out vapor, it'll be found again.