NASA has gone a long way to guarantee Americans some cosmic fireworks for this year鈥檚 Independence Day: 430 million kilometres to be precise. That鈥檚 how far the Deep Impact spacecraft will have travelled since leaving Earth five months ago to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 on 4 July. The craft is right on track to fire a 370-kilogram chunk of copper at the comet, and to analyse the ensuing plume of gas and dust from the collision, NASA officials told a press briefing on 9 June in Washington DC.
鈥淒eep Impact is on track to fire a 370-kilogram chunk of copper at Comet Tempel 1鈥�
Deep Impact鈥檚 results should help us to understand the structure of comets. It will be 500 kilometres from the comet during the impact, and carries 鈥渢he largest telescope that鈥檚 ever gone to deep space鈥�, Michael A鈥橦earn, the mission鈥檚 principal investigator, said at the briefing. 鈥淚t鈥檚 small compared to things like Hubble, but it鈥檚 big compared to Cassini,鈥� he added. NASA鈥檚 one concern, over a fault in Deep Impact鈥檚 telescope that results in blurry pictures, seems to have been resolved. A mathematical manipulation will remove the blurriness from the images once they are received back on Earth.
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Also watching the collision will be the Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer telescopes, along with at least 100 observatories on Earth.
