"Hulk smash spacecraft!"

Kevin

Code Monkey
Staff member
Wouldn't you just love to have a job where your project for day was to take a few million dollar spacecraft and smash it into a coment? Yeah, I'd love to have that kind of job also. :P

Right now I'm sure there a bunch of people envious of this guys at JPL....

[img2=left]http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/TECH/space/01/01/comet.buster.ap/story.vert.deep.impact2.jpg[/img2]CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) -- The big, grown-up boys on the NASA team can hardly wait. Next Fourth of July, they get to bust up a comet, Hollywood-style.
"Blow things up? I'm there. Yeah, I don't have any issue with that," says Richard Grammier, manager of the project for Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (And, oh yeah, he used to work with explosives in the military.)

The spacecraft is called Deep Impact just like the 1998 movie about a comet headed straight for Earth. NASA's goal is to collide a part of the spacecraft called the "impactor" with Comet Tempel 1. Scientists expect the collision to blast a crater into the comet to analyze the ice, dust and other primordial stuff hurled out of the pit.

Mission planners say the energy produced will be like 4.5 tons of TNT going off -- producing a fireworks display for the world's observatories.

...

Astronomers are counting on Deep Impact to live up to its Hollywood name on July 4, six months after its mid-January launch.

This is one spacecraft NASA wants to smash and trash.

"It would be like it's standing in the middle of the road and this huge semi coming down at it at 23,000 mph, you know, just bam!" Grammier says.

...
You can find the full story here....

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/01/comet.buster.ap/index.html
 
skwirlinator said:
My family and myself are all registered on the disk thet will impact. I have certificates and all. Printed them and put them in the family album.
That's definitely a nice item of memorabilia. :cool:

Is the launch being telecast? If so, I suspect that you'll be watching.
 
still waiting for the word, it was my impression they were going to scroll all the names during the impact coverage. there's 560,000 names.
banner-deepimpact04.jpg
 
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