Bull’s-eye! The Deep Impact mission was a remarkable scientific achievement and deservedly sparked applause for the people who planned and built the spacecraft, including the folks at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder.
On Sunday, about midnight Denver time, one part of the space probe smashed into comet Tempel l, while the other recorded the spectacular collision.
For thousands of years, comets have baffled and even frightened humanity. Ancient cultures often considered them bad omens – odd lights in the sky, out of place against the familiar and predictable backdrop of stars and planets. Centuries later, natural philosophers like Edmond Halley could describe the behavior of comets but couldn’t explain them.
The space age brought new understanding, yet important questions remained unanswerable. And, comets still possess an uncanny ability to amaze us, from the 1986 return of Halley’s Comet to the 1997 display of Hale-Bopp, an object so vivid that it was visible to the naked eye at night even from well-lit big-city streets.
But what are comets made of? What’s inside them? Are they lifeless – or did they bring to Earth, long ago, the organic stew that made life on our planet possible? And, serious scientists and ordinary citizens wonder what humanity would do if a comet ever threatened to collide with our planet.
On Friday night, scientists went to bed unable to resolve such puzzles. After a sleepless Saturday, on Sunday morning they had tools and data to unravel at least a few of the mysteries that have endured for centuries.
Scientists and engineers cheered as they watched their pet project get smashed to smithereens, when Deep Impact’s probe crashed into Tempel 1 at a screaming 23,000 mph, blasting open a crater that will give humans a peek inside the comet’s previously hidden interior. The images recorded by the probe’s surviving part are so stunning that the website displaying them has registered more than 1 billion hits worldwide.
Just a tiny flaw in the design, manufacture or piloting of the spacecraft would have ruined the mission, but the little vehicle performed perfectly – a tribute the the Ball Aerospace team. Compliments also are due NASA, the program’s manager; Jet Propulsion Labs in California, which coordinated the mission; and the University of Maryland, lead science investigator.
Now the real fun begins. Let’s get some answers to those questions that have baffled humans for the past 2,500 years or so.
