Deep Impact's collision with comet NASA's Deep Impact probe collided with the comet Tempel 1 on Monday, as intended by scientists. The collision took place at 5:45 UTC and NASA held a press briefing shortly after at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California ,  NASA's non-manned space flight control center. A full-fledged press conference by NASA is scheduled to be at JPL on Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. PDT (9:00 UTC). Following its launch on January 12, 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft took 174 days to reach Comet Tempel 1 at a cruising speed of 103,000 kilometers per hour (64,000 miles per hour). Once the spacecraft reached the vicinity of the comet on July 3, 2005, it separated into two portions, an impactor and a flyby probe. The impactor used its thrusters to move into the path of the comet, impacting 24 hours later at a relative speed of 37,000 kilometers per hour. The impactor has a mass of 370 kilograms and approached Tempel 1 with a relative speed of 10.30 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second), thus delivering 1.96 × 1010 joules of kinetic energy , the equivalent of 4.5 tons of TNT . Scientists believe that the energy of this high-velocity collision will be sufficient to excavate a crater up to 100 meters wide (larger than the bowl of the Roman Colosseum ), although the crater has not yet been spotted in post-impact images because the cloud of debris is obscuring the view. Just minutes after the impact, the flyby probe passed by the nucleus at a close distance of 500 km, taking pictures of the crater position, the ejecta plume, and the entire cometary nucleus. The entire event was photographed by Earth-based telescopes and orbital observatories , such as the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer and XMM-Newton . In addition, the impact was observed by cameras and spectroscopes on board Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, which was about 80 million km from the comet at the time of impact. Rosetta should determine the composition of the gas and dust cloud kicked up by the impact.
Deep Impact's collision with comet 's probe collided with the comet on Monday, as intended by scientists. The collision took place at 5:45 UTC and NASA held a press briefing shortly after at the (JPL) in , , NASA's non-manned space flight control center. A full-fledged press conference by NASA is scheduled to be at JPL on Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. PDT (9:00 UTC). Following its launch on January 12, 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft took 174 days to reach Comet Tempel 1 at a cruising speed of 103,000 kilometers per hour (64,000 miles per hour). Once the spacecraft reached the vicinity of the comet on July 3, 2005, it separated into two portions, an impactor and a flyby probe. The impactor used its thrusters to move into the path of the comet, impacting 24 hours later at a relative speed of 37,000 kilometers per hour. The impactor has a mass of 370 kilograms and approached Tempel 1 with a relative speed of 10.30 kilometers per second (6.3 miles per second), thus delivering 1.96 × 1010 of , the equivalent of 4.5 tons of . Scientists believe that the energy of this high-velocity collision will be sufficient to excavate a crater up to 100 meters wide (larger than the bowl of the Roman ), although the crater has not yet been spotted in post-impact images because the cloud of debris is obscuring the view. Just minutes after the impact, the flyby probe passed by the nucleus at a close distance of 500 km, taking pictures of the crater position, the ejecta plume, and the entire cometary nucleus. The entire event was photographed by Earth-based telescopes and , such as the , , and . In addition, the impact was observed by cameras and spectroscopes on board Europe's spacecraft, which was about 80 million km from the comet at the time of impact. Rosetta should determine the composition of the gas and dust cloud kicked up by the impact.
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joules of kinetic energy
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