NASA's Deep Impact Moved Into Cruise Phase

karvind writes "NASA is reporting that the Deep Impact spacecraft has completed the commissioning phase of the mission and has moved into the cruise phase. Deep Impact mission planners have separated the spacecraft's flight operations into five mission phases. Cruise phase will continue until about 60 days before the encounter with comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. Deep Impact has been covered on slashdot before"

Comments

Re:Fastest non-atomic collision ever?

[mike5904]

Not the fastest, as Sandia National Laboratories have used one of their railguns to propel a .1 gram object at 16,000 m/s (nearly 36000 miles per hour). A spacecraft is certainly larger than that though, so perhaps the greatest kinetic energy of any such collision?