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| 3rd July 2005 | DEEP IMPACT |
Brian Grainger |
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4th July is always very special for the Americans, it being the time they celebrate their independence from my country. This year they plan to celebrate by creating a very special firework display, with the crashing of the Deep Impact space probe into Comet 9P/Tempel 1. Back in January the space probe was lunched and the impactor probe was launched from the mothership at 06:07 GMT on July 3rd. The probe takes just under a day before it hits the comet at 05:52 GMT on the 4th July. At that time the world's telescopes, both here on earth and in space, will be watching to see what happens. There is a small chance you will be able to see something through binoculars, if you know where to look and are in darkness, but to be honest I think we have to look to our telescopes for this one. No one knows for sure what will happen. That is why the probe has been sent. The aim to is to try and find out more about the composition of comets by making a crater on the comet itself and creating a plume of gas and dust to be analysed. While the time of impact will be important, information for the scientists will be coming back for some time afterwards. The event is to be covered by NASA TV and ESA TV, but only the former is viewable on the web. Also there are some web sites which plan to cover the event through images. First of all a schedule of events. All times are in GMT/UTC.
The schedule above has been obtained from the European Southern Observatory, the leader in the observations from Europe, and NASA TV. It lists the main events. There are other broadcast events, which you can see listed on the NASA TV and ESA TV pages. In addition, the Rosetta satellite, which is on its own long journey to a comet rendezvous, has been positioned to look at the Comet Tempel 1. ESA will be hoping to release images from the spacecraft as they are obtained. In the USA the most interesting observer, from a web surfer point of view, appears to be the Kitt Peak Observatory, which is in Tuczon, Arizona. They plan to have images updated roughly every minute on their web site. In addition, an animation will be made of the images, which will also be available on their web site. Here are the web addresses of the web sites mentioned.
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