The Contour Spacecraft Chassis

The illustration at right and photo immediately below right were adapted by A/CC from the Contour mission site's Image Gallery, illustration credit to JHU/APL and photo credit to NASA.

The two images below give a pretty good idea of the size of the Contour spacecraft and what it looked like internally without solar panels and other coverings attached.

A key part of the design was a 10-inch-thick (25cm.) dust shield at the bottom to protect against high speed dust and grit. In borrowing from both armored vehicle design and lightweight flak vest technology, there were five layers of Nextel fabric and a backup layer of Kevlar. In the picture below right, you can see the shield standoffs before the "bullet proof" fabric was installed, and, in the photo below left, you can see that one of the shield's side blanket panels has been rolled back, revealing the installed separated fabric layers (closeup detail above). See Space.com's 26 December 2001 article for more about this dust shielding.

Also clearly visible in the photo below right is the insulated cylindrical compartment (dark) where the STAR 30BP kick rocket would be installed later.

Supplied 29 April 2002 caption from the Contour site: In the Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility 2 (SAEF-2), workers at left hold the antenna and solar panel steady while making adjustments before attaching it to the Comet Nucleus Tour (CONTOUR) spacecraft. Credit NASA.

Supplied caption for this image, which accompanied a JHU/APL 4 Jan. 2002 news release: Don Clopein adjusts the CONTOUR Remote Imager/Spectrograph instrument — or CRISP — during spacecraft integration work at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Credit JHU/APL.