Gentlefolk,

The biggest bang on the 4th of July this year WON’T be coming from the U.S. It will be a bit further away – about 83 million miles or so.

NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft has launched an “impactor”, which should crash into the comet Tempel 1 in the wee hours of the morning. I use the word crash loosely; that bad boy’s impact is expected to excavate a crater more than 25m deep and 100m across. An explosive impact of about 4.5 tons of TNT. I hope that NASA has better luck at hitting this target than some other space interceptor programs do.

All the big optical telescopes are trained on the comet to record, and later measure, what comes out of the explosion. The Deep Impact spacecraft itself will be taking photos of the event.

Inevitably, it seems, there are some who are protesting that NASA shouldn’t do this!

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Eudaimonia

Is that called, "Turning on the boom box?"

A complete waste of time and money as far as i'm concerned

Exploring planets and the solar system is cool.....but blowing shit up just cause we can...well read my first statement

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From what I understand the purpose of the mission is not to blow it up "simply because we can." There is a reason for this mission. I found my information at http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/index.html
This is copied from there:

Principal Investigator, Dr. Michael A'Hearn and his science team want to find clues to the formation of the solar system and more about the structure and composition of comets by making a deep crater in Comet Tempel 1. The science objectives for the mission are:

1. Observe how the crater forms
2. Measure the crater's depth and diameter
3. Measure the composition of the interior of the crater and its ejecta
4. Determine the changes in natural outgassing produced by the impact

If all the great explorers had never wasted money sailing around the known world just because they could where would we all be? We need to expand our knowledge of the solar system, and this is one step.

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I agree!With ALL of the homeless & jobless & starving veterans,I'm sure that the wasted money could be better used.I'm a 10% disabled vet,but I'm one
of the lucky ones,who could still work my ass off! Irish
P.S.One of the smartest things,that my father ever told me was:
Theres NO shame,in not being able to do something,if you're physically
unable.
The shame is in NOT trying!

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Irish---Better to be dead & cool,then alive & uncool!
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Alassë,

Please forgive me for giving the impression that the Deep Impact comet mission was smacking into Tempel 1 just for fun. I let my assumptions run away with me again. Sorry.

Many comets travel around the Sun in long, elliptical orbits, releasing dust and gas each orbit. Most of this dust and gas is released when the comet heats up while it is close to the sun – within the orbit of Mars. The solar wind blows the released dust and gas, the coma, away from the solid, icy core, the nucleus, which we on earth see as the comet’s tail.

Although astronomers believe that the material of the nucleus is unchanged since the Solar System was formed, very little is known about what this material is made of. In a sense, a comet is a time capsule containing information about the formation and early years of the Solar System. This is the first mission to probe beneath the surface of a comet and reveal its interior.

Hitting the comet at about 23,000 mph, the impactor will vaporize, releasing dust and gas from within the comet and exposing pristine material beneath the surface. The impactor will, in this way, function as a geologist’s rock hammer; NASA is chipping off the outer layer of Tempel 1 so that astronomers can get a peek at what is inside.

There are a couple of goals which can be achieved by doing this.

The first is straight up scientific exploration. The Rovers sent to Mars have done a bang-up job assessing the geology, both present and past. As I mentioned above, while astronomers believe that comets are “leftovers” from the time the Solar System was formed, they’ve never been able to look “inside” one. For a variety of reasons, the rover technique was inappropriate for use here. Deep Impact’s impactor will do that for them. For the exobiologists, this may/could provide a measurement of the ratio of water ice in the nucleus, helping to answer the conjecture that water was initially brought to earth by comet bombardment.

The second one is far more romantic – if far less likely. Over the eons the earth has been hit by a number of extraterrestrial objects. Everyone has heard about Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction event, the one which ended the age of the dinosaurs. Evidence has been accumulating over the last few years that a similar, but much larger impact brought on the Permian-Triassic (PT) extinction event, about 252 million years ago, which made the KT event look like a wet squib. It was the Earth's most severe extinction event, with about 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species going extinct. No fooling! This was one bad ass happening! For some time after the PT event, fungal species were the dominant form of terrestrial life!

A few years ago Robert Duvall starred in a SF movie named “Deep Impact” about an attempt to divert a comet on a collision course with Earth. In the unlikely event that a comet is discovered with an obit dangerous to us, by knowing what a comet is made of, we’ll be more likely able to prevent an impact or dangerous flyby.

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Eudaimonia

A little over 2 hrs left! Go NASA!

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Anytime. Anywhere.

Welllllll, maybe....but I'm planning a big bang on the 4th with plenty of Deep Impact.

SS ~ I've already read the information thanx

jseal ~ Whats to forgive? You had your opinion and i mine...

My opinion is the same ~ This mission is a complete waste of time and money

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I agree!The last Big Bang,was things hitting my hip,in VN! Irish

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Irish---Better to be dead & cool,then alive & uncool!
(Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man)

Guess I've always felt like the only thing that went to space was some metal and plastics ... that the money is all still here on Earth going to pay the salaries of the scientists, suppliers, ordinary workers and everyone else involved and that the benefits are increasing the full range of human knowledge. At some point, that increase in human knowledge and understanding will contribute to the well-being of humanity.

At least I hope so.

I get almost more worried about resources offered to help the poor, the hungry, the persecuted don't get to where they're intended, but instead often go to line the pockets of the people who are supposedly managing the distribution of aid.

I know there are good people ... people like those serving in the Peace Corps, or missionaries, or notable people like the late Mother Teresa. Wish there were more like that.

Alasse, I do know what you mean, though. It seems sad that so much is invested in things whose benefit to humanity isn't clear when there are such visible areas where help is desparately needed.

Mr. Lixy was interested in this event for his own "boom, boom" reasons...but I agree that it's a good thing to "know your enemy", so to speak, and it's composition...so that in the event that one does want to enter our atmosphere and threaten us, we can destroy it before it destoys us.

I don't think it was a waste of money at all. Now the war in Iraq? That's another story!

__________________
Minds are like parachutes. They only work when they are open.

~Thomas Dewar~

I don’t know about other people, but I feel that if America is too cheap to spend $300 million to lean about the origins of our solar system well, shame on us. $300 million spread over more than 5 years comes out to be $60 million a year. Cheap! Cheap! Cheap! American looses more than that each year in welfare fraud!

I understand that the chances are really low that a comet might be on a collision course with earth, but if we ever need the information about what makes up a comet, we’ll need it bad. $60 million a year is cheap insurance if it helps protect my kid!

jseal - You may have heard about the ESA's Rosetta mission to make a soft landing on a comet. One of the big unknowns of that mission is the internal structure of the nucleus, how it is stuck together, and the strength of the material.

These are the things the Europeans will want to learn from the analysis of the Deep Impact mission. The data will enable them to tighten up their landing scenerio when putting the Rosetta lander on the nucleus. They'll need all the modelling they can get - a soft landing is a LOT more difficult that what Deep Impact did.

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Anytime. Anywhere.

PalaceGuard,

The Deep Impact / Rosetta missions are reminiscent of the Ranger / Surveyor missions to the moon in the ‘60s. The Ranger series came first, and crashed or hard landed onto the moon, while the Surveyor missions were more advanced and soft landed.

The different mission series each provided useful information for the Apollo landing site selection. Next week, July 20, it will be 36 years ago that Apollo 11 landed on the Sea of Tranquility.

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Eudaimonia