{"id":24801,"date":"2011-02-16T08:54:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T08:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2011\/02\/16\/nasa-shoot-comet-looks-at-hole\/"},"modified":"2011-02-16T08:54:48","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T08:54:48","slug":"nasa-shoot-comet-looks-at-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/16\/nasa-shoot-comet-looks-at-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA shoots comet, looks at hole it made"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the left is the comet minding its own business. On the right is a blobish roundish area where NASA’s impactor probe hit the comet.
\n\"i-1cb542cf6397f505c9c841a08cdc1787-Schultz_4-43-thumb-500x375-61444.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I know, I know, it looks mainly like they just unfocused the image. It turns out that many of the images in the “after” sequence have a crappy focus, but there are enough of them here<\/a> to prove that it really happened.
\n<\/p>\n

NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.<\/p>\n

The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet’s atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006.<\/p>\n

The Stardust-NExT mission met its goals, which included observing surface features that changed in areas previously seen during the 2005 Deep Impact mission; imaging new terrain; and viewing the crater generated when the 2005 mission propelled an impactor at the comet.<\/p>\n

“This mission is 100 percent successful,” said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. “We saw a lot of new things that we didn’t expect, and we’ll be working hard to figure out what Tempel 1 is trying to tell us.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the left is the comet minding its own business. On the right is a blobish roundish area where NASA’s impactor probe hit the comet. I know, I know, it looks mainly like they just unfocused the image. It turns out that many of the images in the “after” sequence have a crappy focus, but … Continue reading NASA shoots comet, looks at hole it made<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[191],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6s1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}