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Stardust Apparently Successful
Naomi_the_butterfly writes "The Stardust mission, a craft launched in February 1999, just concluded its encounter with comet Wild 2 at 11:40:35 am PST. The encounter went without a hitch, with about 72 images taken and comet coma (tail) dust collected! The first images will be downloaded to JPL over between 1:30 and 2:30 pm, in time for a press conference at 3:00 pm PST. Today a comet, tomorrow Mars!" Space.com has a picture taken by the spacecraft.
Images of the enounter may be found here along with live updated status reports here. Looking closely at the overexposed image on the bottom of the first page you can actually make out vapor jets emanating from the surface of Wild produced by the vaporizing ice and dust heated by the sun.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
why use video when you can use......
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/040102a.gif
ANIMATED GIFS!
seriously thats like the longest one ive ever seen. i could only get as far as the guy in the blue shirt and the old people in congress.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
The grandparent's post was not about issuing in-flight corrections, but rather being able to know what went wrong so that future missions will not make the same mistake.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
You question 'coma' but not the word 'comet' itself?
Comet comes from the Greek 'kometes' which means 'the hairy one' (according to Google). So naturally they used 'coma' to describe the 'hair'.
The idea that the names of those fallen soldiers are mixing with stardust today, has been giving me a warm fuzzy feeling. :)