READ MOREBy MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - The big, grown-up boys on the NASA (news - web sites) 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 blast a crater into Comet Tempel 1 and 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 â?? producing a fireworks display for the world's observatories.
Scientists know little about comets and even less about their nuclei, or cores. They believe that penetrating the interior for observations by space and ground telescopes is the next best thing to actually landing, scooping up samples and delivering them to Earth.
"A sample return would be the ultimate, but this is one exciting mission because for the first time we're actually reaching out and we're going to create our own crater," says Donald Yeomans, a senior research scientist at JPL in California â?? and an adviser on the movie.
"We'll understand how the comet is put together, its density, its porosity, whether it has a surface crust and underlying ices, whether it's layered ice, whether it's a wimpy comet or whether it's a rock-hard ice ball. All of these things will become apparent after we smack it."
I can't wait. With spectrography we will be able to 'taste' the contents of the comet and find out what it is really composed of.
Don't worry, this will not cause it to crash into the Earth, NASA promises!
