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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. Silly question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why copper?

    Is it because Tempel 1 is known to not contain any copper itself, so it makes the spectral signature easier to read?

  2. Re:Uh.... does this strike anybody else as wrong? by JerkBoB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Possibily destroying a comet? It seems so destructive to possibly break apart something that's been circling our sun for millions of years.

    Interesting set of priorities there... As for me, I can't wait until we get our act together enough to start mining all of those eons-old lumps of raw material instead of strip-mining our planet.

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  3. On NEOs and orbital physics by freeweed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How acurately can they predict the comets path (whenever I here about near earth passes they are always given in wide ranges as to how near they actually came).

    You hear about near-Earth passes, as you call them, because they're always the first time we've noticed said object getting close to the Earth. This comet (and many others, plus asteroids, etc) has a pretty well-known orbit around the Sun. We have plenty of observations and can accurately predict where it's going to be at any given point in time (barring things like orbital changes due to outgassing, disintegration, etc).

    There's another object in the sky that we can do this with: the Moon. It's VERY close to Earth, yet we can be pretty safe in saying it ain't about to hit us. Lots of observations == confidence in a body's motion.

    The "scary" ones you hear about are new objects we've never seen before, and all of sudden they look like they're coming "close". Once we get enough observations of them, we can calculate their orbits, and you pretty much never hear about them again.

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  4. Re:Consequences of destroying a comet by Saint+Aardvark · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ha! Check out the Engines of Light from Ken MacLeod, who is one of the best goddamned SciFi authors since Heinlein or Gibson. The series is about Gods -- vastly intelligent, hugely complex colonies of bacteria that live in comets -- and what happens when they allow themselves to be discovered by humans.

    I can't possibly do justice to the series here, but I will say that he namechecks Slashdot. Check him out -- his books are absolutely incredible.

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