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A snowstorm on a comet
19 November 2010
You think our winter is crazy here? Whiteouts, snow storms, blizzards... imagine a snowstorm in space - with snow falling up, instead of down! That's what's happening on Comet Hartley right now. Particles of ice and snow - frozen CO2 probably, and some as large as a basketball - are being shot from jets on the comet's surface. This has created a haze of ice and snow around the comet that scientists had never seen before.
The story was posted on NASA's Science News page this week, with some pretty amazing photographs from the most recent fly-by. The Deep Impact spacecraft flew past the comet's nucleus on Nov. 4, 2010, only 700 km (435 miles) away. Here's one of the enhanced images that shows the comet's snowstorm:
Who can forget this, one of the first images sent back by this exciting mission that carefully placed the spacecraft alongside the speeding comet (of course if you were sealed in a stasis chamber or in a coma for the last month, you would have missed this):
This was a spectacular accomplishment. Pinpoint accuracy at these distances and speeds is a bit like shooting a mosquito with a BB gun several miles away. The Deep Impact craft (a recycled craft from a previous comet mission) sped by Hartley at about 27,000 mph (43,548 kph). It turned about 1 degree per second - one-sixth the speed at which a second hand makes its way around a clock face - to capture images of the comet's tail as it passed. The peanut-shaped Hartley is about a mile (1.5 km) along its longest axis. When the two met, the comet was 23 million miles (37 million km) from Earth, and it took 20 minutes for the first pictures to reach NASA's waiting astronomers.
More information can be found on the NASA site and here, and all over the Internet. Here's a great video collage of the images:
Truly an amazing event, and as the latest photos show, there's still more wonder to come.
Of course, it didn't take long for the conspiracy theorists to come out and say it wasn't a comet, but rather a "beaten-up" alien spacecraft (Richard Hoagland, the author of that particular comment, has long advocated that natural stone formations on Mars are really alien structures, and on his website say the Martian moon, Phobos, is really a hollow alien spacecraft). At least no one is claiming the mission and its photos are fake (yet, anyway, there's always room on the Internet for another conspiracy).
The story was posted on NASA's Science News page this week, with some pretty amazing photographs from the most recent fly-by. The Deep Impact spacecraft flew past the comet's nucleus on Nov. 4, 2010, only 700 km (435 miles) away. Here's one of the enhanced images that shows the comet's snowstorm:
Who can forget this, one of the first images sent back by this exciting mission that carefully placed the spacecraft alongside the speeding comet (of course if you were sealed in a stasis chamber or in a coma for the last month, you would have missed this):
This was a spectacular accomplishment. Pinpoint accuracy at these distances and speeds is a bit like shooting a mosquito with a BB gun several miles away. The Deep Impact craft (a recycled craft from a previous comet mission) sped by Hartley at about 27,000 mph (43,548 kph). It turned about 1 degree per second - one-sixth the speed at which a second hand makes its way around a clock face - to capture images of the comet's tail as it passed. The peanut-shaped Hartley is about a mile (1.5 km) along its longest axis. When the two met, the comet was 23 million miles (37 million km) from Earth, and it took 20 minutes for the first pictures to reach NASA's waiting astronomers.
More information can be found on the NASA site and here, and all over the Internet. Here's a great video collage of the images:
Truly an amazing event, and as the latest photos show, there's still more wonder to come.
Of course, it didn't take long for the conspiracy theorists to come out and say it wasn't a comet, but rather a "beaten-up" alien spacecraft (Richard Hoagland, the author of that particular comment, has long advocated that natural stone formations on Mars are really alien structures, and on his website say the Martian moon, Phobos, is really a hollow alien spacecraft). At least no one is claiming the mission and its photos are fake (yet, anyway, there's always room on the Internet for another conspiracy).
