NASA celebrates July 4th with a BANG!

[schmosef]

11:30 p.m. – 3:30 a.m. (July 4) – Deep Impact Commentary (Expected time of impact: 1:52 a.m.)

[SitFlyer]

Latest JPL image

[SitFlyer]

Splat time coming up (fingers crossed)

Final targeting maneuver done.

10 minutes to go.......

[SitFlyer]

getting closer....

[SitFlyer]

...waiting for image....

[SitFlyer]

Impactors final image

[SitFlyer]

Final confirmation - successful impact received!!!!

[Jon P. Inghram]

It make a pretty impressive blast too, cool!

[SitFlyer]

Flyby images

[Dr Mordrid]

WELL....

if NASA can't wrap their spectrometers around THAT there's no hope for 'em

Dr. Mordrid

[SitFlyer]

More impactor images

[MultimediaMan]

"Oh my God...and the quarterback isToast!!!!!

[Jon P. Inghram]

On the post-impact briefing they showed a little animation of the impactor camera sequence, it ran up to 3 seconds until impact!

[schmosef]

just curious. anyone one know a) how much this cost?; and b) how long it will take for the findings to be published?

Is this one of those things that they'll be doing research on for 20 years or will there be short term gains? Like answers to questions that previously only had theorized solutions.

[Dr Mordrid]

This is similar to the Voyager images in that often you don't know what questions to ask until you have the data in hand. Only then can you formulate new ways to analyze the data to answer these unthought of questions.

In this case the preliminary question was "what is the core of a comet made of?", the answer to which can give a clue as to how the solar system formed. No, that isn't a settled issue as recent observations have shown that solar systems can form many different ways with many different outcomes.

The core could have various stratified constituents or be uniform. If it's stratified what is each layer made of based on their order of expulsion? From there who knows what other questions they'll be led to ask by the initial findings? They could find evidence of pre-organic compounds (almost expected) or any number of things.

IMO they'll be analying and re-analyzing this data for many years, or at least until someone lands a probe that can take a deep core sample and return it.

I believe it cost ~$300 million.

Dr. Mordrid