Posted on 07/04/2005 11:03:46 AM PDT by neverdem
WASHINGTON, July 4 -- NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft lived up to its name early Monday when it slammed into a comet with such force that the resulting blast of icy debris stunned scientists with its size and brightness.
With the flyby stage of the two-part spacecraft watching from a safe distance, an 820-pound, copper-core "impactor" craft smashed into the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at 23,000 miles per hour, sending a huge, bright spray of debris into space.
"The impact was spectacular," said Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, the projects principal scientist. "It was much brighter than I expected."
Culminating a six-month journey to a point 83 million miles from Earth, the impactor guided itself to a sunlit point near the bottom of the elongated comet where they collided with a force equal to 4.5 tons of dynamite at 1:52 a.m. Eastern time.
"We've had a far bigger explosion than we anticipated," said Dr. Donald Yeomans, a mission scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which controlled the flight. "It was considerably brighter and there was considerably more matter coming off than I had thought."
The purpose of the $333 million mission was to make the most detailed study of a comet to date, striking the mountain-sized hunk of ice and rock, and creating a crater from which would spew some of the primal material that makes up its core. Depending upon the composition of the comet, scientists speculated that the impact could excavate a crater as large as a sports stadium or as small as a house.
Dr. A'Hearn told an early morning news conference that the blast was so bright that initial images did not reveal the size and depth of the impact crater. This hopefully will be revealed in later images recorded...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Good question. Either the spaceship or the target. Consider this your assignment: bone up on celestial navigation and report back.
From the Islamic world: "What's a comet?"
Numbers are important to engineers.
I just saw a guy from NASA on the news. He said they would take a month going over the data. They will be downloading data from the fly-by craft for next 10 days. They are comparing it to data collected from observatories on earth and in space, e.g. Hubble, Chandra, etc.
Thanks...
They see it with telescopes and determine it's orbit from multiple measurements over time. Once you know the orbit, you know where it will be for quite some time in the future, and where it's been for quite some time in the past. That's actually less true with comets than say for asteroids or planets because comets "outgas" which can effect their orbits slightly.
We should make more and target chinese and russian cities and paris and mecca/medina with them.
That was just toooooooo cool!!!! Such excitement in the anticipation!! And SUCCESS is a WONDERFUL thing!
What do you mean "outgas"? Are they losing mass significantly?
It would have been amusing to have a judge put a restraining order against NASA...just long enough to have the guys at NASA spin their gears.
"For the First Time a Spacecraft Impacts With Comet"
So you're telling me Bruce Willis' mission DIDN'T count?
If this was my project, I sure would be - especially if I had the day off and could avoid all the meetings.
Outgassing occurs when a body with components sufficiently volitile as to vaporize when subjected to a heat source (like the sun), has parts of its form vaporize. This can even form actual jets of vapor, if the volitile components have less volitile materials around them.
Typically comets with elliptical orbits will outgas as the come closer to the sun (predominently from the side facing the sun at the time), and the components ejected will either drift off (forming debris trails), or will recondense or recollect on the comets surface when it heads out away from the sun.
The total mass ejected need not be much to move the comets orbit by as little as the diameter of the comet, and can easily alter it by a few miles out of a several-hundred million mile orbital path.
So far there is a report of how the servers got 5x the traffic NASA expected so they brought a second bank of servers on line, but there is nothing in the category of scientific results.
It will be a week. They are still downloading data.
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