Late last night, at 10:52 PM PST, NASA's "Deep Impact" mission was completed in a spectacularly successful fashion. I stayed up (very late for me!) to watch it live on NASA TV, which was a fascinating experience. I'm used to hearing NASA and JPL folks calling things "nominal", by which they mean that things are proceeding as they expected. In this case, they repeatedly got results that bested "nominal", and you could see the satisfaction, excitement, and pride in the surprisingly large team and one milestone after another was passed with complete success.
In the photos to the right, the left photo is from the high-resolution camera on the flyby spacecraft. You'll recall that yesterday Deep Impact released a separate spacecraft (the "Impactor"). That left photo is showing the result of the Impactor doing its job; it was taken a few seconds after the Impactor impacted. The bright "ejecta" is all the stuff thrown up by the heat and force of Impactor striking the comet's nucleus. It was clear from the reaction of the scientists that the ejecta was much brighter and much more obvious than they were expecting. Getting unexpected results is the hallmark of good science in progress! The right photo was taken from the Impactor just 60 seconds before it struck the cometary nucleus at a relative speed of 23,000 MPH.
Click on either photo for a larger view.
It will be very interesting over the next few days, weeks, and months to see the discoveries made as the extraordinary data from this mission are analyzed. You can stay informed about this directly from NASA's Deep Impact web site.
