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WASHINGTON, July 4 - NASA's 83-million-mile shot at a comet was a bull's-eye. Its Deep Impact spacecraft slammed into its target with such force early Monday that the resulting blast of icy debris stunned scientists with its size and brightness. If you could hear sounds in space, it would have been a big bang.
"The impact was spectacular," said Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, the project's principal scientist. "It was much brighter than I expected."
A NASA spacecraft named Deep Impact is going to shoot an 820-pound projectile into the rocky, icy nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. The 23,000 mph collision will form a big crater, and Deep impact will observe the stages of its development, how deep it gets and how wide it becomes.
Researchers expect a plume of gas and dust to spray out of the crater. Deep Impact will measure its composition and record what the billowing plume does to the comet's atmosphere. In all, Deep Impact should be able to peer into the new crater for almost 15 minutes before the craft speeds away, continuing, like its cometary quarry, to orbit forever around the Sun.
Back on Earth, amateur astronomers will be watching, too. The comet glows like a 10th magnitude star and can be seen through backyard telescopes. It should brighten considerably when Deep Impact strikes. The impact plume will reflect sunlight, boosting the visibility of the comet to 5th or 6th magnitude, making it a faint naked-eye object. The Pacific side of Earth will be facing the comet at the moment of impact (0552 UT on July 4th; 10:52 pm PDT on July 3rd); observers in Hawaii, Mexico and the US southwest are favored
Originally posted by heineken
So what are your views about this...does this episode relates to the Electric Universe Theory in any way, Did Nasa predicted the magnitude of the collision ? , Is electricity present in a comet? will future alignments with comets result in Mag 6+ EQ ?
Deep Impact is a NASA space probe launched on January 12, 2005. It was designed to study the composition of the comet interior of 9P/Tempel, by releasing an impactor into the comet. At 5:52 UTC on July 4, 2005, the impactor successfully collided with the comet's nucleus. The impact excavated debris from the interior of the nucleus, allowing photographs of the impact crater. The photographs showed the comet to be more dusty and less icy than had been expected. The impact generated a large and bright dust cloud, which unexpectedly obscured the view of the impact crater.
Not being able to predict the aftermath of the collision simple shows that NASA know little or nothing really about comets having the standard model faulty and thus cant claim against comet alignments causing earthquakes here on Earth, because simply they still dont have all the data necessary to be 100% correct.
Originally posted by SpringHeeledJack
reply to post by Planet teleX
This is exactly right. The two things are unrelated. One is saying that NASA didn't know what this was composed of (which I find hard to believe) and the other is implying a scientific theory. NASA may not have known the effects due to the fact that finding the chemical composition of an object in space is actually very simple, and it's volume is not much more difficult. However, I'm not sure they could accurately measure mass on this object and therefore could not calculate it's density. By not knowing the density, there is no way to know what the impact would look like.
Originally posted by heineken
so you are saying they were not astonished ny the huge display of the impact?
Originally posted by zvezdar
The EU guys predicted a small explosion followed by a larger very energetic explosion (due to electrical interactions), NASA predicted a single explosion that is not as energetic. That was the main difference in terms of the actual impact, and the EU guys got that right.
There was also predictions around composition (solid rock from EU, 'dirty snowball' from NASA) and the evidence there also leans towards the EU prediction of a solid comet.
Basically the standard model description of a comet being a relatively loose ball of dirt and ice looks shaky following the probes that have been sent to comets and other cometary observations. The 'dirty snowball' theory was used to explain a comet's coma; the EU theory claims that the coma is an electrical discharge phenomena.