Jul 4 2005
From The Space Library
NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, created to analyze the comet Tempel 1, successfully completed a planned crash into Tempel 1, becoming the first mission to probe beneath the surface of a comet. Astronomers believe that analyzing comets can help them better understand the solar system's formation and evolution, because comets are composed of materials from distant regions of the solar system, which formed 4.5 billion years ago. The Deep Impact spacecraft~one of a series of low-cost space science ventures developed under the NASA Discovery Mission~consisted of two vehicles: an impactor and a flyby vehicle. NASA had designed the impactor to crash into Tempel 1, thereby exposing the comet's internal material, and to capture images of the comet until just seconds before impact. NASA intended the flyby vehicle to capture images of Tempel 1's substrata, the internal material of the comet that the impactor's crash would expose, and to conduct chemical analyses of comet debris ejected during the crash. (Guy Gugliotta, “NASA Succeeds in Crashing Craft into Comet,” Washington Post, 5 July 2005; NASA, “Deep Impact: Mission to a Comet, Spacecraft and Instruments,” http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/mission/index.html (accessed 12 June 2009).)
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