Deep Impact: Comet whacking
Not satisfied with earthly fireworks on July 4th?
How about an impact intended to vapourize a football stadium sized hole in a comet!
Space.com summarizes the mission
NASA official site
JPL mission page
Those who were participants in the Send Your Name to a Comet program can claim their message as orbital vapour after impact.
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
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
NASA TV has the following press events scheduled:
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.
How about an impact intended to vapourize a football stadium sized hole in a comet!
Space.com summarizes the mission
NASA official site
JPL mission page
Those who were participants in the Send Your Name to a Comet program can claim their message as orbital vapour after impact.
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
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
NASA TV has the following press events scheduled:
Quote:
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.
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.
Comments
that will spell teh doom of mankind
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)
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.
Lots of engineering com chatter if you're into that kind of thing.
2+ hours to impact.
Now I'm off to the linked site for viewing tips on the off chance the Bay Area has a view.....
Maybe general science besides computers?
(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.
Best webcast I can find is a 150Kbps Real10 stream
(if anybody has linkage to a higher bandwidth connection, please share.)
The NASA TV Landing page links to 150Kbps Real8 or 150Kbps Windows Media Streams
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.
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.
11 minutes to impact. All systems go.
And Damn Impressive Impact pictures!
After
Confirmation of Impact
Note clock differences and brightness graph changes in lower right
ShpladOW!!!
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