Deep Impact: Comet whacking

[curiousuburb]

Not satisfied with earthly fireworks on July 4th?

How about an impact intended to vapourize a football stadium sized hole in a comet!

http://www.planetary.org/deepimpact/images/di_art_rawlings-pat_600x400.jpg

Space.com summarizes the mission (http://www.space.com/deepimpact/)

NASA official site (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html)

JPL mission page (http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html)

Those who were participants in the Send Your Name to a Comet (http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/sendyourname/index.html) program can claim their message as orbital vapour after impact (http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/050630_deep_impact_CDs.html).

At this point, I've now sent names of relatives to Mars on the MER rovers, Comet Wild-2 via Stardust (due to return), and to Comet Tempel 1. Immortality of a sort via a program that sparks imagination and participation. Novel, and in this case, cool. ;)

Folks who missed the earlier participatory activities can still play comet games...
Guess the crater size, win a prize (http://www.planetary.org/deepimpact/contest_enter.html)

As for the impact itself, viewers in Western Canada and parts of the Pacific have a good shot at watching the show (skies permitting), so I'm crossing my fingers and polishing my binoculars for any flashes east of Spica around 10:52PM PDT on July 3rd.

Observing tips can be found here (http://deepimpact.umd.edu/amateur/)

NASA TV has the following press events scheduled:
Deep Impact Press Encounter Events - Jul. 1 - 4
All times PDT.

Pre-impact briefing: July 1, 10 a.m.
Pre-impact update: July 3, 11 a.m.
NASA TV coverage: July 3, 8:30 p.m.
Expected time of impact: July 3, 10:52 p.m.
Post-impact briefing: July 4, 1 a.m.
Post-impact press conference: July 4, 11 a.m.

Regular teevee will be full of comet news for the next week as the general public clues in.

No need to put the torpedoes into the exhaust port, an impact on the surface is fine, Luke.

[AquaMac]

Brilliant, there really should be an amateur astronomy thread in AppleOutsider. :D . A q u a M a c .

[sunilraman]

i hope we don't awaken any ancient alien species/ viruses/ hardware/ beacons somehow
that will spell teh doom of mankind :err: :smokey: :lol:

[curiousuburb]

Deep Impact mission reports successful separation of its Impactor spacecraft.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/deepimpact/2005-07-03/070305-imp_mri-480-229.jpg

On target for collision with the comet within 12 hours.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ has a timeline and links to more sites and webcasts.

First Spectrographic data is coming back... (click for details)

http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/jpg/sunshine-516-321-med.jpg (http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/sunshine.html)

[sunilraman]

Cool. Preemptive strike. Whack the comet first before it whacks us. ;)

[sunilraman]

on a more educated note, i did biology and computer science at university. i always seemed to enjoy reading bandwidth spikes rather than some nasty ass shite we had to do interpreting NMR spectroscopy for (organic?) chemistry classes.

it still gives me the heebie jeebies... *shudder*

so, my question is,

what is all the other stuff on the spectrum? for other wavelengths theres some other peaks, and what's the big chunk of stuff to the left of where the infra-red has detected h20?

your enlightening guidance is appreciated, oh leet appleinsiders.

[curiousuburb]

All spacecraft systems report green in advance of next clock timed events for AutoNav.

Lots of engineering com chatter if you're into that kind of thing.

2+ hours to impact.

[addabox]

As always, 'Burb, my heart felt kudos for your thorough and timely space exploration threads. AO is my one stop source for all things NASA, thanks to you.

Now I'm off to the linked site for viewing tips on the off chance the Bay Area has a view.....

[addabox]

Oh, and an "Astronomy/astrophysics" type forum would be fantastic.

Maybe general science besides computers?

[curiousuburb]

Impactor AutoNav is targeting and has completed its first of three scheduled burns.
(one at 90 mins out, one at 40, and a final trajectory correction at 12 minutes to impact)

AutoNav images are being downlinked (though they're not high res).

All systems are go.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/121172main_targetmaneuver-330.jpg Click for Flash Feature from NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/deepimpact_flash/index.html)

[curiousuburb]

NASA TV coverage has lots of engineering chatter, some nice Maas Digital animations, and various rocket scientists giving interviews during the commentary prior to impact.

Best webcast I can find is a 150Kbps Real10 stream (rtsp://vanseg-3.arc.nasa.gov/encoder/nasa_tv.rm)
(if anybody has linkage to a higher bandwidth connection, please share.)

The NASA TV Landing page (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html) links to 150Kbps Real8 or 150Kbps Windows Media Streams

[curiousuburb]

If you do see geek footage, they've cleverly assigned colour codes for shirts.

the red shirts are the impactor team (oh no!), blue shirts are flyby team,
white shirts are management, the ESA guy is in banana yellow, but no shatner. ;)

[curiousuburb]

Impactor Trajectory Maneuver # 2 has occurred. All systems look good.

They've released a raw picture from the Impactor camera (four quadrants of distinctly different brightness due to CCD, pre-deconvolving [fixing the out of focus error they discovered after launch])

More impressive, NASA TV showed one of the first images (through 8 filters) from the high-resolution camera. I can't see it on the gallery site yet, but it looks like the nucleus is relatively eggplant shaped with some large depressions or craters.

Sounds like the image processing turnaround is approaching 60 seconds from reception to 'public'.

One of the team science women mentioned the impactor dumps to the flyby for storage on NVRAM, and that they expect to fill one of the boards to 95% before dumping to the other NVRAM board and starting relay send to earth.

Camera rotation on one set of gimbals needs to be synched with high gain antenna pointing at earth on another set of gimbals.

Looking very optimistic at this point that they'll get spectacular results. Maybe 1m resolution.

That said, they expect the flyby spacecraft to go through a dust cloud, and all the rushed relay is in case the flyby doesn't survive. If it does, bonus.

[curiousuburb]

Final Impactor Targeting Maneuver #3 completed.

11 minutes to impact. All systems go.

[curiousuburb]

And the partying begins... confirmation of impact!

And Damn Impressive Impact pictures!

[drumsticks]

Where are you viewing the pictures from?

[addabox]

It's pretty wild how closely the graphic from NASA you posted at the beginning of the thread matches the actual impact shots.

[curiousuburb]

Before
http://www.davidlegatt.com/images/albums/userpics/10002/Picture%204.png

After
http://www.davidlegatt.com/images/albums/userpics/10002/Picture%202.png

Confirmation of Impact
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/images/Confirmation.jpg

Note clock differences and brightness graph changes in lower right

[addabox]

You know, for a "dirty snowball" that thing sure does have a lot of interesting surface topography.

[sCreeD]

Certainly got a new one today. :D

ShpladOW!!!

[sunilraman]

take that comet !!! bwah ha ha ha hahha ha :devil:

well, this makes me feel more at peace. we can definitely blow up any rogue comet with nukes if it threatens earth. awesome. and we probably wouldn't have to risk any real people, just probes and droids and stuff.

bwah ha hah haha hahaha ha hha :devil:

[addabox]

Originally posted by sunilraman
take that comet !!! bwah ha ha ha hahha ha :devil:

well, this makes me feel more at peace. we can definitely blow up any rogue comet with nukes if it threatens earth. awesome. and we probably wouldn't have to risk any real people, just probes and droids and stuff.

bwah ha hah haha hahaha ha hha :devil:

I believe disaster movies have made it clear that any effort to blow up a comet or asteroid just breaks it up into chunks that will do even more damage, and that in fact our only real hope lies in a fast track mission of an ad hoc team of lovable, wisecracking misfits who will leave one of their members behind.

Oh wait, I'm thinking of how you fix social security......

[sunilraman]

Originally posted by addabox
I believe disaster movies have made it clear that any effort to blow up a comet or asteroid just breaks it up into chunks that will do even more damage, and that in fact our only real hope lies in a fast track mission of an ad hoc team of lovable, wisecracking misfits who will leave one of their members behind.

Oh wait, I'm thinking of how you fix social security......

ROFLMAO :lol: heh heh

[Aurora]

Originally posted by sunilraman
take that comet !!! bwah ha ha ha hahha ha :devil:

well, this makes me feel more at peace. we can definitely blow up any rogue comet with nukes if it threatens earth. awesome. and we probably wouldn't have to risk any real people, just probes and droids and stuff.

bwah ha hah haha hahaha ha hha :devil: The problem is seeing some of these things before they hit. Even in the last few decades there has been a few rocks that came and went before we even realized it. We need to have more searches going on. Bravo to NASA they did a great job on this one. Now if we can just get a cheap and safe way to low earth orbit we will be on our way.:)

[curiousuburb]

Impactor nosecam movie...


http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/images/movie-still-impactorPOV1.jpg We're Going In (http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121493main_Impactor%20POV%20to%20crash.mov)

Some impressive resolution before the camera lens got blasted by dust.

[johnq]

Why are there never any stars in these types of pictures? I know hollywood jacks up the star size and count to look cooler but NASA shit is all pitch black space and not at all like what I can see from the ground (which is a ton of stars).

I understand exposures etc. but even the handheld videocameras on the shuttles, when auto adjusting exposures as they moved, never show a hint of stars.

[Aurora]

Originally posted by johnq
Why are there never any stars in these types of pictures? I know hollywood jacks up the star size and count to look cooler but NASA shit is all pitch black space and not at all like what I can see from the ground (which is a ton of stars).

I understand exposures etc. but even the handheld videocameras on the shuttles, when auto adjusting exposures as they moved, never show a hint of stars. 1 there are more stars then hollywood uses and 2 the bright object overpowers any hint of a star background, its like looking into the sun. Thanks curiussuburb for the quicktime link.:smokey:

[curiousuburb]

Originally posted by johnq
Why are there never any stars in these types of pictures? I know hollywood jacks up the star size and count to look cooler but NASA shit is all pitch black space and not at all like what I can see from the ground (which is a ton of stars).

I understand exposures etc. but even the handheld videocameras on the shuttles, when auto adjusting exposures as they moved, never show a hint of stars.

In some cases, they've filtered the image to subtract stars, because depending on mission, that's not what they're interested in and they can get more precise imaging of the real target with special processing.

In the majority of other cases, it's mostly a matter of sensitivity and exposure.

[curiousuburb]

Flyby Spacecraft offers first movies of impact.

Still in need of processing to clean up the images, but even the preliminary shows an epic smack.

(note that the actual movies are smaller res than the blowup stills linked below.

Medium Resolution Camera
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/121529main_MRI-impact-516-300.jpgClick for QT Movie (http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121527main_MRI_impact.mov)

High Resolution Camera
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/121521main_HRI-516-300.jpgClick for QT Movie (http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121520main_HRI-Movie.mov)

Impressive!

[sunilraman]

Originally posted by curiousuburb
Impactor nosecam movie...


http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/images/movie-still-impactorPOV1.jpg We're Going In (http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121493main_Impactor%20POV%20to%20crash.mov)

Some impressive resolution before the camera lens got blasted by dust.


good stuff. stellar, if i may say so (pun intended)

you do know that all the 3d and visual effects artists are just creaming themselves over all this stuff, mainly because they're getting NASA 'reference' footage for a lot of their work.

from a visual effects perspective, three things stand out

1. the camera is able to resolve all the comet 'halo' away and just focus on the nucleus, which looks like an asteroid

2. a lot of surface texture, not much geysers and debris being ejected from the nucleus, even for the 'sun side' of the comet

3. totally unlike the movies Deep Impact and Armageddon ;) there is apparently no fancy flying required by han solo - type hotshot pilots on approach to the surface, mainly because of IMHO see point 2. above


hmmmm
..............
..............

[iNAP]

Absolutely amazing! great thread