Astronomy, like particle physics, can sometime be about releasing lots of energy by smashing things together.
With the flyby stage of the two-part spacecraft watching from a safe distance, an 820-pound, copper-core "impactor" craft smashed into the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at 23,000 miles per hour, sending a huge, bright spray of debris into space.
"The impact was spectacular," said Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, the projects principal scientist. "It was much brighter than I expected."
Culminating a six-month journey to a point 83 million miles from Earth, the impactor guided itself to a sunlit point near the bottom of the elongated comet where they collided with a force equal to 4.5 tons of dynamite at 1:52 a.m. Eastern time.
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2 comments:
Sometimes science is about *blam*.
I'm a big fan of blowing things up to see how they work. Why else go into science?
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