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NASA's Deep Impact

Posted by timothy on from the metric-bathtub-or-imperial dept.

NivenMK1 writes "The Seattle Times has an interesting article on NASA's plan to nail the comet Tempel 1 with a chunk of copper the size of a bathtub on July 4 this year. This copper 'bullet' is intended to strike the comet at approximately 23,000 mph and hit with a force equivalent to 4.7 tons of TNT. Scientists hope to discover what exactly the comet is made of and what changes have occurred to the outer layers with reference to the core."

4 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Expensive launch mass? by HeghmoH · · Score: 5, Informative

    The lump of copper is 820 pounds, and will be equivalent to 5 tons of TNT. If you sent an 820-pound lump of TNT, you would get an explosion of about 5.4 tons of TNT. An extra .4 tons-TNT increase, in exchange for a vastly more dangerous mission and chemical contamination is not a good trade.

    At these speeds, the kinetic energy is so great that chemical explosives are nearly pointless.

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  2. NASA Website by themo0c0w · · Score: 4, Informative

    This project has been around since 2001; probably a dup /. article somewhere... Anyway, here is the NASA website, which gives more details on the mission.

    http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/

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  3. Re:Silly question... by XenonDif · · Score: 5, Informative
    to quote NASA:

    "The impactor is made primarily of copper (49%) as opposed to aluminum (24%) because it minimizes corruption of spectral emission lines that are used to analyze the nucleus."

    http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/tech/impactor.html

  4. One more good reason... by p_trekkie · · Score: 5, Informative

    Another reason they are doing a kinetic impact is because they want to judge the structure of the comet. Right now, scientists don't really know if the comet's consistency is that of a fluffy snowball or a hard chunk of ice. If you used explosives, you would have melting of the ice, whatever its consistency, and would get less information about the construction of the comet. Once possibility is that the comet might be loosely packed enough that the impactor goes in one side and flies out the other....

    Also, I'm surprised the article submitter didn't include a link to the mission website.....