NASA’s Deep Impact Spacesraft
NASA was just delivered its new comet exploring spacecraft named Deep Impact. This vessel will be launched on Dec. 30 of this year and if all goes well it will rendevouz with the comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. The spacecraft is designed to deliver a 820-lb hunk of copper, dubbed “hammer”, the size of a bathtub, to the commet at a velocity of 23,000 mph. The “hammer” is to expose the inner most materials of the comet so that scientists can discover the composition of it and also hopefully predict the comet’s past and origins.
If all goes well, an 820-pound copper “hammer” the size of a bathtub will separate from its mother ship and, 24 hours later, smash into the comet’s icy nucleus at about 23,000 mph.
“It’s bound to be a blast,” said Lucy McFadden, a University of Maryland astronomer and member of the Deep Impact team.
The high-speed impact will wallop the pickle-shaped comet with energy equivalent to 4.8 tons of TNT, said Michael A’Hearn, another UM astronomer and principal investigator on the $311 million mission.
Nobody’s sure what will happen next. There’s a small chance the impactor will blow the 2-½-mile-long comet to smithereens, or simply bore through it like a bullet through a snowball. More likely, scientists say, it will blast open a crater the size of a football stadium. It all depends on what Tempel 1 is made of, and how sturdily it is composed.
Which is exactly what scientists hope to learn.
The blast also will reveal the comet’s interior chemistry and nail down more precisely what conditions were like when it formed at the solar system’s birth more than 4.5 billion years ago.