It was reported some months ago that they were going to slam some probes into a comet.
Deep Impact is currently scheduled for a 1:47 p.m. EST (1847 GMT) liftoff from Launch Pad 17B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If all goes well, the mission's two spacecraft will tag team Comet Tempel 1 on July 4, with Impactor set to slam into the icy wanderer while Flyby looks on.
Built for NASA by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., Deep Impact is designed to give researchers their first glimpse of the inner workings of a comet. By crashing Impactor into Tempel 1, thought to be a rather typical example of comets, researchers hope to glimpse pristine material that have not changed since the formation of the solar system.
"The interesting part of this mission is that we don't really know what to expect," said Don Yeomans, a senior research scientist with the Deep Impact mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "But no matter what happens, we'll observe the phenomena."
It's a bit more like Armageddon than Deep Impact, but what the heck.
Rising Water
For years we've been in denial about it but the Greenhouse Effect is kicking in as the sea level rises. This creates a few more problems for people living at sea level. So...
To read more, click here.Leaders of 37 small island states meet in Mauritius this week to discuss an early warning system to protect against tsunamis and a creeping rise in ocean levels, blamed widely on global warming.
Rising sea levels, now about 0.08 inch a year, could swamp low-lying countries like Tuvalu in the Pacific or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean if temperatures keep rising. They could also lead to hugely expensive damage worldwide.
"It's often presented as a problem only for developing nations," said Mike MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs at the Climate Institute, a Washington think-tank. "(But) developed countries will be very much at risk because so much infrastructure is at sea level."
- Art Neuro
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