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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."
No stars in the backgrounds? this most obviously be a hoax created by our American Overlords just like the moon landings! Those tricky bastards won't trick ME again!
... 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.
Just because no one else has, yet: inept animated gif
1 tonne of TNT = 4.184 x 10^9 joule = 4.184 Gigajoules/tonne
:-)
19/4.184 ~ 4.5 tonnes TNT
TNT has a lot of energy
NASA headshots Tempel 1 >(x.x)-
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
No one slammed a "satellite" into a comet, but rather a space ship released an impactor that crashed into the comet.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Bruce Willis declined to comment on his upcoming engagement, however insider sources were heard to say that he was looking forward to having a 'smashing time'.
Yep, this is the best sort of science. Serious and far-reaching but with a plot that Hollywood would pinch and incredibly good fun too!
Can you imagine being the person responsible for the weight smashing into the comet, it would wipe the floor with DOOM 3, (although maybe the soundtrack would not be quite so "atmospheric")!
With all that outgassing, you would think a comet's surface would be a lot more sharp -- full of crevasses and ridges (like it was on Deep Impact) But this one seemed almost smooth, like an asteroid. I wonder if this will change the theory of how comets are constructed?
Ugliest Dog I Ever Saw
> If the internal makeup of this comet does represent the compounds present at the start of the solar system, there could be some serious head scratching and changing of theories going on if amino acids are found, let alone any more complex organic compounds like RNA/DNA, however unlikely.
We already know that amino acids are present in deep space. Slightly more complex molecules too, IIRC.
Of course, that just means they're relatively easy to form by non-biological processes, so it doesn't necessarily follow that they originated on earth by falling from space.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is quite likely the finest result Nasa has had for a long time. To quote a professor who was quite surprised by the event :
"It was like mosquito hitting a 747. What we've found is that the mosquito didn't splat on the surface, it's actually gone through the windscreen."
The photos too, are quite amazing. A huge amount of stellar dust, ice, and rock exploded out of Tempel 1's surface. All from the impact of a probe just the size of a washing machine.
Over the following few days, the second module of the mission will further analyse the materials ejected from the comet, and it is believed scientists will discover much about the creation of the universe (some of the material hasn't been disturbed in over 4 billion years) and the composition of comets in general over the next few months as they complete their analysis of this great event.
I wonder if it will be friends with me?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Or the equivalent of a Supersized meal from McDonalds...
Pay girls to strip!
This is a gif animation of the impact as observed from the Lowell Observatory.
Yes, it's just that the news last night said "about 5 kilotonnes", so does that mean that the 4GJ figure is wrong or was the news...Actually why don't we just calculate it:
.5*372Kg*(37000Km/hr=10000m/s)^2 -> 18.6GJ.
So, the news was wrong. Fair enough.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Where was the loud, comet shattering kaboom? I'll tell you what, Mars will not be happy when they hear this, or that they didn't hear this.
Oh Well. Guess next time I will have to use an Illudium-Q-36 Space Modulator.
(toddles off)
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
btw: The pictures are just breathtaking... on them it really looks like 4.5kt (which is a testemony of the amazing light collection power of current telescopes and quantum efficiency of CCD arrays)
:-)
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the apparent 'explosion' visible in the images is due to sunlight illuminating the plume of dust produced by the impact. Comet nuclei are pretty dark, so I suppose the exposure times were probably cranked right up to see anything of the nucleus itself.
This is all guesswork, of course, but I remember a similar explanation of the 'explosions' visible when the Shoemaker Levy 9 comet fragments hit Jupiter. Mankind has kind of built our own tiny version of that!
Of course, the above could all be utterly incorrect...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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!
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.6 93.htm
. impact.sues.reut/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1406
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/07/04/deep
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
It's not the explosion that detects the presence of organic compounds but the observations you can make about the generated blast debris. Either mid or infra-red spectroscopy or radio emissions reveal what compounds are present by their signatures.
Think CSI in space :-)
Sir Bedevere: ...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.
King Arthur: This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
(Okay! I know it is not about the Earth, but anyway...)
Insert `fortune -o` here
"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.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Yes, I guess, if you are referring to this?
-- Prem
Aiming to tweet on a rice
Is this the day the comet people, after an uprovoked robotic suicide bombing, begin their war on the people of earth? After all, the freedom of the Oort cloud is at stake.
Tempel: 1
Impactor: 0
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.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
come on where are our priorities?
The cost of this mission to you does not represent tax dollars to you. In fact, it's probably tax "cents". Tell me how a few million dollars will end starvation, genocide or ecological collapse? It would just be wasted there, too. At least this way we "waste" it in new and unusual ways and gain knowledge, but I know this is not important to you.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There's a handy tool for doing that kind of calculations, called 'units'.
A marsbar (65g) has about 294 kilocalories (source: http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/calories/calo rie_counter/chocolate_sweets.htm)
So, we edit /usr/share/misc/units.dat (may wary depending on distro) to add the line:
marsbar 294 kilocalorieWe then launch units:
%units2085 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 19 gigajoules
You want: marsbars
* 15435.619
/ 6.4785221e-05
You have:
So apparently, 19 gigajoules of energy equals ~15436 mars bars.
I think you'll find that's a picture of the comet's nucleus in the crescent type phase... here's a better view of it.
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
until we send manned probes crashing into comets.
"85 million miles from Earth..." http://hubblesite.org/
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Seems the electrical universe people haven't had time to update their website about their prediction about the results. IIRC, they were saying that the results would be much less spectacular than predicted, and yet a few hours ago I heard some of the NASA people expressing surprise because the impact released a lot more material than most of them expected. The electric universe proponents also seemed to think that the impactor electrical systems would fail before it reached the comet (because of "megalightning" and all that), while they seem to have have lasted right up until the impact.
So....will they do the right thing and modify their theory to fit the observations, or will we be treated to a lot of hand-wringing about how the theory actually predicted this result (but us non-electrodynamical people just don't understand the theory and its implications)?
And will /. post a follow-up article about the electric universe proponents' reaction to the results, or is that not news for nerds?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Still, the Chicago Tribune (registration required... google for the AP version) has another comparative paragraph:
So there's still a great deal of uncertainty, but man, 23,000 mph is a heck of a hit-and-run accident.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
No.
Ignoring the fact that this was supremly cheap, that the money would not have funded a season of "Extreme makeover home edition." Much less solved genocide or starvation.
Ignoring the fact that this provided important scientific information about the formation of the solar system. Yeah, ignore that.
_WHERE DO YOU THINK THEY SPENT THE MONEY?_
This is your tax dollars going to continue to fund the lives of thousands of american citizens, businesses large and small.
I don't know, but it crashed shortly after booting up.
(Thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the Veal.)
Lump lingered last in line for brains, and the ones she got were sorta rotten and insane.
All this technology over there and the big media (like CNN) have to display a picture captured from video of a picture of a projection screen picture of some geeks desktop as the main event picture. WTF?
Then we get other pictures that have a large black border around them so they are so small they are not worth even looking at.
Can't you guys have a computer there with a decent video output card in it that connects to the JPL internal network and a ftp server that contains pictures as they come in?
I mean, how hard can it be to have a ftp server set up that *automatically* (via a shell or perl script) processes the pictures as they are received and places them on a ftp server, maybe one that even us people who paid for the mission can access.
I am still waiting today for some good pictures, all there is this morning are low res pictures.
Can't these rocket science people figure out how to write a perl script that processes those pictures to make a better quality in a automatic and quick way?
I appreciate all your work, but it's really frustrating at this end knowing how to program and having high speed access, but yet not able to get any good raw data.
How about a UDP broadcast stream we can all tap into and get the raw data ourselves and decode it ourselves via open source software? You think we couldn't understand your specs on the data format? Just give it to us, include sample test data. I can process data as good as your guys there, just give me some specs.
You mean the Rosetta mission?
Currently en route to a close rendezvous with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, to be followed by releasing a lander (which will use a harpoon to cling to the surface). It was in a position to make distant observations of comet Tempel for the current fireworks show.
It won't do what you describe but will instead take a roundabout route that will allow it to basically sneak up on the comet.
Oh, and it's European, not American :-)
No, really: Tunguska, June 30th 1908. :)
It does.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That goes without saying. Recall the law on the shape of flying food.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
From the original post: "Initially thought to be shaped like a pickle, it came to resemble more of a banana shape as comet Tempel I drew closer." For four seasons I hosted Inside Space, a science fact program on the SciFi Channel (it's like being on the Celibacy Show on Playboy). We traveled everywhere visiting the brightest minds in space (pun intended) and nearly every human on the Earth who has "rocket scientist" on his/her business card. There was one recurring theme. Everything in space that's not a planet or star is potato shaped - period, case closed. Next.
I took a look at that website and I can see that they're a bunch of loons. It surprises me when I read websites made by someone who obviously has a good grasp on math and science, but apparently little to no grasp on reality. I find it strange that people can turn out that way.
What's the name of that condition? They can accurately calculate the energy released when they open a bottle of soda, but when they can't find a belonging of theirs, the notion that a space alien came by and collected it for testing seems just as plausible to them as the possibility that they just misplaced it. No grasp on reality.
It's like stabbing a screwdriver into a Swiss watch, to learn how it keeps time.
--
make install -not war
You are absolutely wrong. Gasses are fluids. Fluid is a term used to describe both gasses and liquids. Surface tension is unique to liquids. It has nothing to do with being a fluid.
Definition:
fluid
n.
A continuous, amorphous substance whose molecules move freely past one another and that has the tendency to assume the shape of its container; a liquid or gas.
Random and weird software I've written.
Next time would be better if:
The first remark is that they haven't transfered most of the data back yet. So pictures from the lower res camera probably came first. You may be seeing the best available.
Second, it is contradictory to both ask for the "raw" data, and then expect that data to be processed. Automated processing isn't useful scientifically. I doubt they have software smart enough to automatically compensate for the vagaries of the instrument and the data observed.
The suggestion that the mother ship do a 29,000 mph velocity change and match the trajectory of the comet to continue observing it is such a contrast with the other, reasonable suggestions that I took it for a troll at first. It is just so patently foolish that he MUST be trying to get a reaction. But looking at jmichalg's other posts I see no clear evidence of other trollery. Oh he likes to argue but is it a troll?
So which is it? Are you ignorant or obnoxious?
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla put together a fairly nice animated GIF of the impact and posted it to the Society's official blog:
g es/encounter/animation-small.gif
http://planetary.org.nyud.net:8090/deepimpact/ima
Her description: OK, I've managed to get back on the raw image website, and I grabbed a whole bunch of the images that we were apparently looking at earlier. I just threw together this little animation, showing mostly Impact Targeting Sensor images, but moving at the end to some Medium Resolution Imager images. Now, I've probably dropped some frames, and these images are smaller than the ones the scientists get to use, but I have to say that this is pretty sweet as it is. I can't wait to see what the scientists produce!
Having destroyed our base on Tempel 1, prepare to meet the wrath of the full Saturnian space fleet.
Hmm, and I note that although you slashdotters have welcomed every other overlord, you haven't welcomed us.
We will remember that.
We brits hit Mars a few months back already!
:P
You remember - it was called "Deep doodoo" or something.
Think about it from the frame of reference of the sun. The earth is orbiting the earth. Now this little copper thing the size of an oil barrel (the impactor) and the satellite leave earth orbit **just barely** by increasing its velocity beyond the velocity of the earth. That is, escaping earth's gravitational well. From the point of view of the sun, the impactor and satellite are still orbiting it. It doesnt matter if it did complete an orbit. Unimpeded it would have.
... ask a real rocket scientist or astrophysicist. That's the problem with you whipersnappers nowadays... ;)
Second point of view: the velocity of the impactor was less than the escape velocity required to escape orbit from the sun. Therefore it had to be orbiting the sun.
Not to mention, astrophysicists and rocket scientists will routinely refer to hyperbolic orbits as orbits, even though they will never complete a revolution. In fact, at infinite time they will approach 180 degrees. But it is perfectly acceptable to consider this an orbit. (consult Brown, "Elements of Spacecraft Design" or any orbital mechanics text)
Who gives a rip about answers.com
IAAAE (I am an Aerospace Engineer)
-everphilski-
I've read that the Waikiki Beach event attracted 10,000 people. I'm not sure how many usually show up for the free "Sunset on the Beach" movies, though, so I don't know what the delta was there. I don't have numbers for Bishop either.
Hilo and Maui each had hundreds of attendees, were standing (or sitting on the floor) room only, had to open extra rooms for NASA TV streams, and still had people standing outside looking in the doors. The Keck headquarters in Waimea got about twice as many people as could fit inside.
Of course, anybody with enough bandwidth can watch NASA TV, but in our main program space (far too small, alas!) we also had a few other attractions:
- Lots of free posters, stickers, etc.
- Professional astronomers Shadia Habbal, J.D. Armstrong and Jonathan Williams fielding questions and, in Jon's case, giving a presentation.
- Live video links (via iChat AV) with a group of students from Hawaii and Iceland who were one floor above us, remotely operating the Faulkes telescope on Haleakala as part of a workshop with educators from the US, Iceland and the UK.
- Display of up-to-the-minute images off Faulkes. (Yes, the comet got a whole lot brighter!)
- Live video links with, and a presentation from, Mike Martin of Boeing (which provided the rocket), who was on the summit of Haleakala.
- Live video chat with Mike Maberry, Assistant Director for Maui at the U. of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, also on the summit of Haleakala.
- Live video chat with Bill Giebink of the IfA, who was on the summit of Haleakala to keep an eye on Faulkes. (And who, I might note, showed up on video with his granddaughter sitting on his shoulders.)
- Live video chat with Glenn at the Smithsonian-Harvard-Taiwan submillimeter array on Mauna Kea
- Live video chat with Hiroko at the Caltech submillimeter observatory on Mauna Kea
- A couple brief bits of live streaming video from Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.
The Maui News said something about "live television feeds" - nope, all the people we were talking to were over iChat AV.Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.