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Deep Impact Blasts Off For Comet Tempel 1
Wynken de Word writes "NASA's Deep Impact, a copper-fortified, comet-busting spacecraft, was launched Wednesday afternoon. 'NASA had a single second - at precisely eight seconds past 1:47 p.m. - to send Deep Impact on a 431-million-kilometre, six-month voyage to Comet Tempel 1.' The goal is to blast a big hole in the comet and check out what's preserved inside. Also see the Deep Impact site."
That's all mentioned in the article, which I'm sure you read but forgot. A TV sized unit will seperate a day earlier and go smack into the "big rock". The other craft will monitor from a safe distance.
Trolling is a art,
Um, no. Comets are ice (in theory).
I was recently reading a book which talked about the possibility of projects such as this. It is well worth a read if you can get your hands on it.
Also, the article says how a lot of the simulation was done on Open Source software, namely this. Give it a download.
As always there are updates at spaceflightnow.com. It appears the spacecraft has safed itself as of a few minutes ago....not good.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I'm sure you just forgot this after reading the article, but the names of the movie and project were apparently derived independently of each other--and around the same time.
It's not like 2004 rolled around and someone who saw the movie decided to call the project 'Deep Impact'
Rewind to Jan 2nd, and search. (You can pick up a few +5 posts for reuse while you're there.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just to clarify, Deep Impact didn't have a launch window of only 1:47:08 PM EST, it also could have launched at 1:08:20 PM EST for 12 January 2004. It actually had until 28 January to launch.
It's possible to predict the solar system very far into the future with very high accuracy, since it's an almost perfect Newtonian system- it's in a vacuum, so there's no friction, and the masses and volumes involved are very large, so there are no tiny, chaotic behaviors to worry about. About the only thing that could make for a large inaccuracy in the prediction is a massive body NASA hasn't detected yet, but AFAIK the last time that happened was the discovery of Pluto in 1930. NASA knows exactly what this impact will do to the comet's path.
How can you call Huygens an "impactor"? It's a piggybacked probe, not an impactor. In fact, they're hoping that it will still be transmitting even after it lands (it has a small surface science package), although it'll be hitting at a pretty high speed for that, so who knows.
;) They'll probably start getting raw images up in 2 to 2 1/2 days... ah, what a nice Friday that will be ;)
I know this must make me a real geek, but I've been really excited lately... just think - in 1 day 10 hours, we'll have our first probe ever on Titan, one of the most interesting bodies in the solar system, and one that keeps stubbornly frustrating scientists
We're practicing our labials.