Deep Impact a Success

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Bayes The Engineer Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Albany, New York Posts: 5170 Good Answers: 129	Deep Impact a Success 07/05/2005 9:33 AM
	NASA successfully crashed the impactor into Temple 1. The Deep Impact spacecraft traveled 268 million miles to get the comet in its sights. Late Saturday, it released its copper "impactor" probe and pointed it toward Tempel 1, 83 million miles from Earth. The probe made a 24-hour solo flight toward the comet, heading for a smash-up. The pictures from the probe, right before impact are awesome. If NASA made a short movie out of this they could probably double their funding in DVD sales.
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Steve Power-User Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 390 Good Answers: 8	#1 Did you see it? 07/05/2005 9:58 AM
	I stayed up late and watched it on NASA TV It wasn't as exciting to watch as the landing of the Mars Rovers, but it was still pretty cool. At one point the commentator mentioned that the closure speed of 23,000 mph was about 5X the speed of a rifle bullet. He said that the best analogy he could think of was that they were trying to hit a rifle bullet with another rifle bullet, while keeping the cameras on a third rifle bullet that was whizzing by trained on the event. Quite an engineering feat! If you were in the western part of the country it was in your night sky, and the collision was possibly visible to the naked eye. Did anybody out there see it?
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BRodda The Feature Creep Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Boston, MA Posts: 1055	#2 Explosive 07/05/2005 10:06 AM
	The fact that it hit with 4.5 tons of TNT was impressive considering the probe was only the size of a dishwasher. __________________ "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet." -William Gibson
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Bayes The Engineer Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Albany, New York Posts: 5170 Good Answers: 129	#3 In reply to #1 Re:Did you see it? 07/05/2005 10:10 AM
	That movie is awesome. I hope this starts a trend of NASA crashing probes into more stuff, if only for the impact videos.
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Bayes (1); BRodda (1); Steve (1)