Cometary Fireworks Go Off Without Hitch

PingXao writes "The JPL Deep Impact mission has successfully slammed a sattelite into Tempel 1 at 23,000 mph. (37,000 kph). The autonomous navigation system was primed for up to 3 course corrections in the final 2 hours of flight but only had to execute two of them. The second was so small - expending less than a pound of propellant - that impact would have occurred without it. Initially thought to be shaped like a pickle, it came to resemble more of a banana shape as comet Tempel I drew closer. Impact was estimated to have released 19 Gigajoules of energy, or the equivalent of 4.5 tons of TNT."

Comments

And the real question is ...

[Ihlosi]

... what did the explosion sound like.

Seems like NASA has missed the chance to answer this profound question raised by Sci-Fi enthusiast by not putting a microphone onboard the flyby probe.

PWND!!11

[Mahou]

NASA headshots Tempel 1 >(x.x)-

Last Words

[MichaelSmith]

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

What's all the fuss about.

[mike1086]

Did someone think this wouldn't work?

NASA have proven quite adept at smashing space craft into various celestial bodies.

Oh hang on...maybe they weren't suppose to do that!

Astrologist Sues NASA over comet crash

[ScorpFromHell]

A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s14066 93.htm
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/07/04/deep. impact.sues.reut/

Size

[PhotoGuy]

"Washing machine sized", they say. I'm lost, help me out here. That must be a tecchie unit of measurement that is only used internally by NASA or something. Can someone put that in terms of "Volkswagens" or "Libraries of Congress" for me?

Maybe the Unix "units" program will do it for me.

Let's see:

$ units
1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: washingmachine
You want: volkswagen
* 0.25
/ 4

You have: washingmachine
You want: librariesofcongress
* 0.0001
/ 10000

Ah, now I can visual it.

Experiment result

[BigYawn]

Nasa just released the results of their collision experiment:

Tempel: 1
Impactor: 0

Partly Offtopic

[hyfe]

http://us.cnn.com/ US headline: 'Smashing success': Probe crashes on comet

http://edition.cnn.com/ International headline: 'NASA probe collides with comet'

So CNN has an official policy of only providing cheesy headlines to Americans? That's a policy I can live with though.

And now in terms you're familiar with

[Jesus_666]

1 Kcal = 4186 J
1 Snickers contains 280 Kcal = 1172080 J = 0.00117208 GJ
19 / 0.00117208 ~ 16210.5 Snickers

So the amount of energy released is the equivalent of about 16.2 Megasnickers.