spiegel Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 A NASA space probe collides with the comet Tempel 1 early Monday in this photo snapped by a "flyby" spacecraft's high-resolution camera. The Deep Impact mission sent an "impactor" module careening into the nucleus of the comet at 23,000 mph. The resulting blast was possibly the equivalent of 5 tons of TNT. LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- NASA is considering an encore for its Deep Impact spacecraft, which made history earlier this month when it smashed a hole in a comet to study its frozen primordial core.While the space agency has not approved a specific future mission, it gave scientists at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena the go-ahead to bring the spacecraft closer to Earth's orbit for a potential mission extension. "We're trying to maintain as many options as we can," Andrew Dantzler, the director of NASA's solar system division, said Tuesday. Deep Impact planned to fire its thrusters Wednesday to slightly change course in a maneuver that will bring it back to Earth by 2008. The spacecraft then will switch to safe mode to conserve energy until it receives orders for a possible second mission. If left untouched, the spacecraft will drift farther away. The original mission called for the mothership to release an 820-pound copper impactor into the path of the onrushing comet Tempel 1, record the collision from a distance and retire as space junk. But the mothership remained surprisingly healthy despite being bombarded with debris during a close flyby of Tempel 1 minutes after the collision. Members of the Deep Impact team hope the maneuver will allow the spacecraft to steer toward 85P/Boethin, a comet that was discovered in 1975 and orbits the sun every 11 years. Since Deep Impact carried only one impactor, any future mission will not cause a cosmic smashup. Instead, scientists hope the scientific instruments aboard Deep Impact will allow them a detailed glimpse of yet another comet. Mission principal investigator Michael A'Hearn said a possible extended project would cost about $32 million; the Deep Impact mission cost $333 million. The July 4 collision 83 million miles from Earth gave off two flashes of bright light and carved a crater in the potato-shaped comet. A larger-than-expected debris cloud extended thousands of miles into space, and has prevented scientists from peering into the comet's interior. The impactor vaporized as it crashed on the comet's sunlit side, but the mothership survived unharmed. It flew within 310 miles of Tempel 1 and took pictures of the comet as it flew away. Comets are irregular bodies of ice and dust that orbit the sun and were born about 4.5 billion years ago -- nearly the same time as the solar system itself. When a cloud of gas and dust condensed to form the sun and planets, comets formed from what was left over. Studying them could shed light on how the solar system formed. Deep Impact blasted off in January from Florida for a 268-million-mile journey toward Tempel 1, which was discovered in 1867 and moves around the sun in an elliptical orbit between Mars and Jupiter every six or so years. Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dashel Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 That's too cool, give that man another impactor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ev0| Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 Well, I think for one the next time we do a mission like this, we should equip it with explosives (perhaps nuclear explosives) as rockets or missiles on the mothercraft, that way it can shoot a bigger hole in the comet and be reusuable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vincent Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 Well, I think for one the next time we do a mission like this, we should equip it with explosives (perhaps nuclear explosives) as rockets or missiles on the mothercraft, that way it can shoot a bigger hole in the comet and be reusuable. 586248105[/snapback] a nuclear explosion would just be too risky, not only that i think they will run the chance of diverting one into the wrong direction, changing it's course to collide with another body...... On the optimistic side They just might be able tocalculate on how/where to hit it with such an explosive, but then you have to ask yourself, what would the benefit be in smahing a nuke into. Well the counter argument to that may be that a deeper crater might reveal something that we are yet to discover that ALL comets might contain. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vincent Posted July 21, 2005 Share Posted July 21, 2005 (edited) comets are believed to have come from Kuiper belt which is just beyond the orbit of pluto and sedna (fairly tenth-ish planet our solar system) the gravitional tug from the combined planets on these icy objects are believed to either push or tug an object, in the event of a tug the object hurdles towards our solar system and if it isn't swallowed up by Jupiter's gravitational force (comet shoemaker-levy 9) then it will hurdle towards the sun. As it approaches the heat from the sun begins to sort melt the comet producing a tail of debris several thousand miles long. Now the objects in the Kuiper belt are theorized to be remnants of acretion when our solar system was being formed, in other words they are failed planets and the Kuiper belt is this sort of cosmic junkyards. full of planetary crap. there is a small chance that, Pluto and Sedna are believed to not be planets but members of this belt. Edited July 21, 2005 by ripgut Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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