Cometary Fireworks Go Off Without Hitch

Posted by Zonk on Monday July 4, 2005 @12:01AM from the waaay-better-than-the-movie dept.

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."

2 of 374 comments (clear)

You forgot Discovery! by Eric_Cartman_South_P · 2005-07-04 05:58 · Score: 0, Troll

What about all those experiments on the Discov... uh... nevermind.
just checking by wimp_org · 2005-07-04 07:36 · Score: 0, Troll

Is it just me or are there other people that where carefully inspecting the last couple of frames of the quicktime movie in a hope to see something 'alien'.

Good thing there wasn't anything there.
We really would have screwed it up bigtime if the last frames contained footage of, for instance, a large intergalactic radio relay station owned by some, not so nice anymore, powerfull alien race.

Wimp