NASA's FIRST New Millennium craft, the Deep Space 1, equipped with an ion-propulsion system and to be launched in July 1998, will fly past the asteroid McAulliffe and the comet West-Kohoutek-Ikemura, NASA has announced (Flight International, 10-16 January).
Another New Millennium spacecraft will be flown in formation with the Landsat 7 remote-sensing satellite, to be launched in December 1998, to evaluate an advanced hyperspectral-imaging instrument which could extend the data-set beyond the Landsat series. Two micro-penetrators, developed under the New Millennium programme, will be carried aboard the Mars Surveyor Lander, to be launched in January 1999. The 2kg sensors will be dropped from the spacecraft 110km above the Red Planet and, upon impact, will penetrate the Martian soil to a depth of 2m (Flight International, 20 December, 1995-2 January).
Source: Flight International