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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.
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?
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
Also a pretty cool, official NASA Quicktime movie from the impactor's camera - kind of wobbly and jerky, but nifty nevertheless.
;-)
I think it contains what are by far the best, and closest pictures of a comet nucleus - and I've no idea if it's from 'final' data yet. I gather there's a lot left to download from the flyby probe, but was it a Huygens-Cassini style relay setup or was impactor data received directly on Earth? If it's the latter, I suppose there isn't much chance of retrieving any more of the close-up data, as the delicate hardware stuck to the impactor's copper mass must have made quite a splat...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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.
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
"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.
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? """
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.
until we send manned probes crashing into comets.
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']
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. :)
You obviously don't know what's going on. First of all, most of the data has not been received yet. Its still being transmitted to NASA from the probe. Right now we're only getting low res pictures because that's all that's been sent. The priority right now is data gathering, not data transmittal.
Second, automated image enhancement is pointless. As an amateur photographer, I know that each picture needs to be optimized manually, and using automatic settings often works, but not always. You'll get good pictures, but not 12 hours after impact. Plus I'm sure much of what they received wasn't good anyway and had to be thrown out.
Third, you obviously don't know the complexity of these projects. Most of the public doesn't really care about the low resolution pictures - they'll see the high res pictures when they're broadcast by the media. Which means that there's no point for NASA to deal with the 0.1% of the public who think they deserve to get access to those pictures.
Fourth, I'm really rather insulted by your pompous attitude regarding the people at NASA. No, I don't work at NASA. Nor can I call myself a scientist yet. But I'm an undergraduate physics major and so far my plans are to go on to grad school. Right now I'm spending the summer at the biggest NSF-funded project (not hard to figure out which one it is) and I will tell you that the people who run the project are brilliant and have no time to deal with whiners like you. If you really wanted to work on these kinds of missions, why didn't you dedicate your life to science instead of just whining about how you don't have access to all the data. Because I doubt you can figure out much from the data, and I find your arrogance to be purely insulting.