Shooting Comets

November 28th 2004 at 11:07 pm

What’s cooler than hitting a comet with a slug of copper the size of a bathtub to see what happens next?

The high-speed impact will wallop the pickle-shaped comet with energy equivalent to 4.8 tons of TNT, said Michael A’Hearn, a University of Maryland astronomer and principal investigator on the $311 million mission.

Nobody’s sure what will happen next. There’s a small chance the impactor will blow the 2 1/2-mile-long comet to smithereens, or simply bore right through it like a bullet through a snowball. More likely, scientists say, it will blast open a crater the size of a football stadium. It all depends on what Tempel 1 is made of.

Science at it’s finest. Will they have live video of this? I can only hope…

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