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NASA Deep Impact comet probe set to launch
NASA readied the launch of a probe that will give earthlings their first glimpse of the innards of a comet, scientists said. The Deep Impact launch is set for 12:48 pm (1748 GMT) Wednesday, aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, in the southern US state of Florida.
By July 4, the probe is due to run into the comet Tempel 1, blow a hole in its surface and send out a shower of debris that can be analyzed.
Tempel will be 132 million kilometers (82 million miles) from Earth by the time it meets Deep Impact.
When Deep Impact is 24 hours from the comet, it will fire a 370 kilogram (830 pound) projectile at the comet at 37,000 kilometers (23,000 miles) per hour.
The resulting hole in the comet will be large enough to swallow Rome's Coliseum, scientists said, and the material blown out will be observed by a probe flying nearby, as well as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
"NASA's long tradition for the exploration of the solar system seeks to answer the fundamental questions of how the solar system formed, why it's the way it is and how it will evolve, whether life exists beyond the Earth and whether (it can) be sustained beyond the Earth," said Andy Dantzler, acting director of the space agency's solar system division.
"Comets, the oldest bodies in the solar system, hold the clues to many of these questions," he said.
Comets are debris left over from the formation of the solar system some five billion years or so ago.
NASA expects that the insides of Tempel will more resemble the solar system's raw materials than the components of Earth or other planets, which have undergone extensive evolution.
Tempel 1 is one of the comets passing closest to the Earth as it makes its 5.5-year orbits around the sun.
Tempel 1 was discovered in 1867, but is of interest to NASA as it has little activity on its surface and because its slow rotation.
"Studies of brightness variations with time indicate that the comet rotates much more slowly than Earth," according to NASA.
"Its rotation will not take the impact crater out of the spacecraft's field of view during the encounter period." |
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![NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft gets final checks December 2004, by technicians from Ball Aerospace at Astrotech's facility in Titusville, Florida of the USA. The Deep Impact launch is set for 12:48 pm (1748 GMT) Wednesday, aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, in the southern US state of Florida. [AFP/File]](xin_26010212094218599507.jpg)
