* Astronomy

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully released its impactor at 0707 GMT (2:07 am EST).

At release, the impactor was about 880,000 kilometres away from its quarry. The separation of flyby spacecraft and the washing-machine-sized, copper-fortified impactor is one in a series of important mission milestones that will cap off with a planned encounter with the comet at 05:52 GMT (1:52 a.m. on July 4, EDT).

Six hours prior to impactor release, the Deep Impact spacecraft successfully performed its fourth trajectory correction manoeuvre. The 30-second burn changed the spacecraft's velocity by about one kilometre per hour. The goal of the burn is to place the impactor as close as possible to the direct path of onrushing comet Tempel 1.



Soon after the trajectory manoeuvre was completed, the impactor engineers began the final steps that would lead to it being ready for free flight. The plan culminated with activation of the impactor's batteries at 05:12 GMT (1:12 a.m. Sunday, EDT). Deep Impact's impactor has no solar cells; the vehicle's batteries are expected to provide all the power required for its short day-long life.

In order to release the impactor, separation pyros fired allowing a spring to uncoil and separate the two spacecraft at a speed of about 35 centimetres per second.
With Tempel 1 closing the distance between it and impactor at about 10 kilometres per second, there is little time for mission controllers to admire their work.
Twelve minutes after impactor release the flyby began a 14-minute long divert burn that slowed its velocity relative to the impactor by 102 metres per second, moving it out of the path of the onrushing comet nucleus and setting the stage for a ringside seat of celestial fireworks to come less than 24 hours later.

Deep Impact mission controllers have confirmed the impactor's S-band antenna is talking to the flyby spacecraft. All impactor data including the expected remarkable images of its final dive into the comet's nucleus will be transmitted to the flyby craft -- which will then downlink them to Deep Space Network antennas that are listening 134 million kilometres away.
While all is going as expected on the Deep Impact spacecraft the comet itself is putting on something of a show.
The 14-kilometer-long comet Tempel 1 displayed another cometary outburst on July 2 when a massive, short-lived blast of ice or other particles escaped from inside the comet's nucleus and temporarily expanded the size and reflectivity of the cloud of dust and gas (coma) that surrounds it. The July 2 outburst is the fourth observed in the past three weeks.
Three of the outbursts appear to have originated from the same area on the surface of the nucleus but they do not occur every time that that area faces the Sun.

"The comet is definitely full of surprises so far and probably has a few more in store for us. None of this overly concerns us nor has it forced us to modify our nominal mission plan." - Rick Grammier, Deep Impact Project Manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.

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-- Edited by Blobrana at 20:13, 2005-07-03

Swift's ultraviolet telescope recorded this picture of Tempel 1 on June 29th. Because the image is registered on the comet, the background stars appear as short trails.


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The Swift satellite normally used to spot gamma-ray bursts in the distant universe.

Star chart

NASA's Deeep Impact spacecraft have observed a massive, short-lived outburst of ice or other particles from comet Tempel 1 that temporarily expanded the size and reflectivity of the cloud of dust and gas (coma) that surrounds the comet nucleus.

The outburst, which was detected as a dramatic brightening of the comet on June 22, is the second of two such events observed in the past two weeks. A smaller outburst was seen on June 14 by ground-based observers, the Hubble Space Telescope and Deep Impact.


Mpeg Movie

The raw images of the medium resolution imager on the Deeep Impact spacecraft from June 22 - June 24, 2005 are displayed in this movie. A brightening by a factor of about 5 and rapid decay to baseline brightness can be seen on June 22. As the comet moves through space, background stars pass into and out of the field of view, and cosmic rays hitting the detector give an appearance of flickering, that is an artefact of space cameras that remain to be removed.

"This most recent outburst was six times larger than the one observed on June 14, but the ejected material dissipated almost entirely within about a half day" - Astronomer Michael A'Hearn, University of Maryland, leader of the Deep Impact mission.

A'Hearn noted that data from the spectrometer aboard the spacecraft showed that during the June 22 outburst, the amount of water vapour in the coma doubled, while the amount of other gases, including carbon dioxide, increased even more.

"Outbursts such as this may be a very common phenomenon on many comets, but they are rarely observed in sufficient detail to understand them because it is normally so difficult to obtain enough time on telescopes to discover such phenomena. We likely would have missed this exciting event, except that we are now getting almost continuous coverage of the comet with the spacecraft's imaging and spectroscopy instruments" - Michael A'Hearn.

Deep Impact co-investigator Jessica Sunshine, with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), agreed that observing such activity twice in one week suggests outbursts are fairly common.

"We must now consider them as a significant part of the processing that occurs on comets as they heat up when approaching the sun. The spectrometer is working very well and we already are able to see changes in the make up of the fresh material extruded from the comet. We are still a long way from the comet, so this bodes very well for our ability to observe and characterize changes in the comet's materials, before, during, and after our impact " - Jessica Sunshine, who leads the analysis of data from the spectrometer.

Science team member Tony Farnham, also of the University of Maryland, noted that although the duration (less than 18 hours) of both outburst events was comparable, the June 22 event was much more spectacular, exhibiting intricate features in the coma where material was blown off the surface.
A'Hearn and other mission scientists say that most outbursts are believed to be associated with the heating of comet material by the Sun. Comet Tempel 1 is near perihelion, or the point in its orbit at which it is closest to the Sun.

"For the June 22 event, it is the rapid dispersal of this outburst that raises the most questions. It looks as though the puff was nearly instantaneous and that simple radial expansion is not enough to make the brightness go down as fast as it did. Thus the particles must also either be vaporizing, and thus disappearing, or getting much darker after release, and 'disappearing' in that way" - Michael A'Hearn

"This adds to the level of excitement as we come down to the final days before encounter. But this comet outburst will require no modification to mission plan and in no way affects spacecraft safety." - Rick Grammier, Deep Impact project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

Deep Impact - which consists of a sub-compact-car-sized flyby spacecraft and an impactor spacecraft about the size of a washing machine - carries a spectrometer and three imaging instruments.
The three imaging instruments, two on the flyby spacecraft and one on the impactor, are essentially digital cameras connected to telescopes. The spectrometer is on the flyby spacecraft and uses the same telescope as the flyby's high-resolution imager.
A spectrometer takes light that is emitted, absorbed, or scattered by materials (such as the dust and gas of the comet) and breaks it into its component wavelengths, or spectrum.
It does this in much the same way that a prism breaks visible light into its component spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet).
However, visible light represents only a narrow range of the spectrum of light. The Deep Impact spectrometer measures light in the infrared range rather than visible light. By analyzing data from a spectrometer scientists can determine the composition of the materials being studied.

The Deep Impact scientists will be able to analyze data from their spectrometer to determine the composition of the material that is ejected from the crater during impact and to observe how the composition of that material changes over time.
The final prelude to that impact will begin early on July 3, some 24 hours before the 1:52 a.m. (EDT) July 4th impact, when the flyby spacecraft will launch the impactor into the path of the onrushing comet.

Like a copper penny pitched up into the air just in front of a speeding tractor-trailer truck, the 820-pound impactor will be run down by the comet early on July 4. It will collide with the nucleus at an impact, or closing, speed of some 23,000 miles per hour.
A'Hearn and his fellow mission scientists expect the impact to create a crater several hundred feet in size; ejecting ice, dust and gas from the crater and revealing pristine material beneath. The impact will have no significant effect on the orbit of Tempel 1, which poses no threat to Earth.

Nearby, Deep Impact's 'flyby' spacecraft will use its medium and high resolution imagers and infrared spectrometer to collect and send back to Earth pictures and spectra of the event.
In addition, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and large and small telescopes on Earth also will observe the impact and its aftermath.

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