Comet Tempel 1

[miriam_e]

Fasten your seatbelts and put your tray tables in their upright, locked positions, and prepare for a crash landing. We are going in...


There is a short movie here:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/multimedia/070405-its-approach-x4.html
(only about 700k -- 2 minutes download on dialup connection)

Comments

Yeah

[exileinparadise.livejournal.com]

I had to re-read THE HEART OF THE COMET by Greg Benford and David Brin in celebration of Tempel 1 getting the smackdown.

If you have never read it, give it a whirl... but be prepared, its a pretty somber work all the way thru to the end. Lot's of setbacks for the Halley mission.

Of course... now some astrology in Russia is suing NASA for $330 million (the cost of the Deep Impact mission BTW) for disrupting the celestial harmony and messing up her horoscope or some such nonsense.

NASA is so bad at PR, I hope they don't lose.

Re: Yeah

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I haven't read The Heart of the Comet. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Heheheheh. :) Astrology. Those people are completely nuts. Hear about the French Professor of Astrology (yes, they teach it in University over there) who got sick of other professors constantly making fun of him so he embarked on an enormous survey to put it on a sound scientific footing? After some months of hard work he came up with zero correlation with any aspect of astrology. He believed completely in the correctness of astrology however and figured the survey wasn't big enough to show the effects, so he began a truly breathtaking survey of thousands of people all over Europe -- not just France. This survey took a lot longer to complete and analyse. In the end it came up with... nothing. Heheheheh :)

Well, not quite. The astrology community trumpeted that he proved astrology by finding the so-called Mars Effect -- that professional athletes are more likely to be born when Mars is rising. The trouble is that the effect is statistically so tiny that it can easily be explained by random fluctuations that you'd expect in nonsense data.

From memory the astrologer's name is Gauquelin (I'm pretty sure I've misspelled that). I just love that he proved astrology is crap.

Re: Yeah

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Gosh. I'm amazed to report that I spelled the name Gauquelin correctly! Go Miriam!