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DEEP IMPACT - BULL'S EYE!
The Impactor hits bull's eye on Comet Tempel 1 -
News, updates and photo gallery
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT
Eighty-three million miles away, fireworks lit up the cold, dark space as a probe released by an American spacecraft slammed into Comet Tempel 1, powering through the solar system at a speed of 37,100 kilometers per hour. The spacecraft
and the impactor clicked pictures of the celestial blast at the grand finale of its six-month suicide mission. As the metal impactor was vaporised, its mother ship Deep Impact furiously clicked pictures of the first-ever date with a comet, from a safe distance of 5000 miles.
The Deep Impact, which happened at Indian time 11.20 am on July 4, marks the successful end of NASA's $ 333 million project to blast a hole into a comet, and peer at what lies inside. Engineers and scientists at the NASA mission control room cheered, applauded, and hugged each other on news of the successful crash.
Comets are flying pieces of gas and debris in space, which orbit the Sun at regular intervals. Comet Tempel 1 was discovered in 1876, orbiting the Sun every 5-6 years. Comets were formed during the toddler days of the Universe, when gigantic masses of gas and dust condensed to form stars, like the Sun. Comets are leftover debris from those days, whose core still contains the primordial universe-building matter. Since they constantly revolve around the Sun, their outside surface undergoes constant change, but the core remain the same. The Deep Impact Mission, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, aimed to smash a hole into the face of the comet to view its inner depths. The images transmitted across the millions of miles will now be analysed by scientists to draw better inferences of the formation of the solar system.
The Deep Impact blasted off on January 12, 2005 on a six-month space voyage to Comet Tempel 1. Deep Impact carried a mother ship and a copper impactor. The mother spacecraft released the impactor for collision with the comet 24 hours before the event. Both the mother ship and the impactor (about the size of a washing machine) were fitted with auto-navigation systems to steer themselves toward/away from the comet, with equipment to click and transmit pictures back to the mission control centre at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab.
Once it separated from the mother ship, the impactor guided itself ahead on auto-navigation, on battery power. The craft cruised solo in space for 800,000 kilometers, before it smashed into the face of the comet and blew up. Till 3 seconds before it flew into the comet at a speed of 37,100 kilometers an hour, the impactor kept transmittting images of the comet to Earth, which showed a clearly cratered Comet Tempel 1. The stage-managed cosmic collision expelled energy equal to bursting nearly 5 tonnes of dynamite.
The blast was expected to punch a hole the size of a large house to a football stadium on the Comet. Details of the Deep Impact are still awaited. Flying debris from the cosmic impact may destroy the mother ship, by which time it would have transmitted its inventory of pictures back to earth. Immediately after the impact, the flyby craft (mother ship) changes to safety mode for self-protection.
An image released by NASA showed a bright spot in the lower portion of the comet where the spacecraft had slammed in, belching a cloud of debris into space. Scientists have dismissed any possibility of the comet changing course or turning destructive due to the Deep Impact mission. The impact will make only a negligible change in the super-speed of the comet or its trajectory.
Inflow and organisation of the blast data will continue till August. After which, scientists, researchers and engineers will study the data for nearly another year, till April 2006. Deep Impact data is expected to become an invaluable resource for many other space scientists, agencies, and missions in future.
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT |
