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NASA to study the entrails of a comet

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Source
DECCAN HERALD

Date
2005-06-27

Information
Hoping to get their first peek at the inside of a comet, astronomers at NASA plan to blast a stadium-sized hole through one of the heavenly bodies.

If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1, about 130 million km away from Earth at the time of impact. Its a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with a third bullet in the right place at the right time, said Rick Grammier, project manager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Scientists hope the July 4 collision will gouge a crater in the comets surface large enough to reveal its pristine core and perhaps yield cosmic clues to the origin of the solar system. The comet is about half the size of Manhattan, or roughly 28 square kilometres.

NASAs fleet of space-based observatories, including the Hubble telescope, along with an army of ground-based telescopes around the world are expected to record the impact and resulting crater. The big question is: What kind of fireworks can sky-gazers expect to see from Earth? Scientists do not know yet. But if the probe hits the bulls-eye, the impact could temporarily light up the comet as much as 40 times brighter than normal.

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