BEFORE NASA鈥檚 Deep Impact spacecraft smashed into comet Tempel 1 on 4 July, scientists had been placing bets on just how big a crater would form on the comet鈥檚 nucleus. Now, it looks as if the pot will go unclaimed.
NASA says it cannot see the crater because its computers cannot fix the fuzzy pictures taken by the High Resolution Instrument, a camera on the fly-by spacecraft. NASA first discovered that the HRI was not focussing properly in March and blamed the fuzzy images on moisture settling in the camera. The agency was confident that some nifty image processing on Earth would reveal more detail.
Unfortunately, the computer technique only works on high-contrast images. When the impactor probe struck Tempel 1, it raised so much dust that surface features became too faint for computers to work their magic. Deep Impact鈥檚 principal investigator, Michael A鈥橦earn of the University of Maryland, says his team is still in contact with the fly-by spacecraft, re-calibrating the HRI, and will have another go at the crater images using the new calibration data. 鈥淲e still hope to see the crater,鈥� he says.
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Regardless, A鈥橦earn believes the mission was a great success. 鈥淥ur view is that we went to a new place and have done exciting new science, just perhaps not as much as we had hoped.鈥�
