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Deep Impact Mission May Be Extended

Posted by Zonk on Fri Apr 13, 2007 03:44 PM
from the that-was-a-crappy-movie dept.
Space NASA
SeaDour writes "The famous Deep Impact mission, which in 2005 launched a projectile in the path of comet Tempel 1, may be extended by NASA. The proposal is to slingshot the probe around the Earth as it passes by at the end of this year, putting it on a trajectory to reach comet Boethin in December 2008. Scientists want to see if the strange composition and behavior of Tempel 1 is more common than they had previously assumed. (The probe only had one projectile though, so we will not see another brilliant man-made explosion on this comet.) Additionally, while the probe is en route to the comet, researchers will point its on-board telescope at known exosolar planets to determine the compositions of their atmospheres."
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[+] Comet Probes Given New Duties 48 comments
iamlucky13 writes "In January of 2004, the NASA's Stardust mission made a flyby of comet Wild-2, taking images and collecting samples from its tail that have since been returned to earth in a detachable capsule. On July 4, 2005, Deep Impact smashed a 350 kg projectile traveling 37,000 km/h into comet Tempel 1 as part of its studies of that object. With both craft in good shape at the end of their missions, NASA has been considering additional tasks for the probes. These plans have now been confirmed with a variety of tasks costing an estimated 15% what a new mission would. Among the new duties will be a revisit of Tempel 1, a flyby of comet Boethin, and transit studies of known extra-solar planets."
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  • Maybe they could hit Halley's comet [wikipedia.org] in 1986.

  • US Only (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Stanistani (808333) on Friday April 13 2007, @03:55PM (#18724397) Homepage Journal
    I feel this would be a very good use of my tax dollars - getting a second mission from the same spacecraft.
    • A very small percentage of your tax dollars anyway. Compare the cost of that spacecraft to a day of operations in iraq.
      • Or for that matter, compare a day of operations in Iraq to a day of operations for the entire US. Do you people just love to bring this stuff up. Someone is glad that his tax dollars are being put to a better use and the only thing you can respond with is that there's a conflict in Iraq costing a lot of money? Did you also think that when the OP talked about his tax dollars that he was actually referring to just his tax dollars and not anybody else's?
        • "You people?"

          I just selected a convenient comparison. Everyone knows the giant numbers for the cost of operations in iraq. Fewer know the cost of operations for the entire US. Today I would have chosen to point out that the cost of the space craft is like a 10th of the tax gap... The idea is to select something that's on the news every day. I don't give a crap about the politics behind it.

          You people are dickheads.

      • Please. Let's keep Iraq out of this thread. Don't assume you know anything about my opinions on that.

        I enjoy watching NASA and some kick-ass engineers make and use functional exploration spacecraft.

        Don't ask me to talk about the manned exploration side of NASA, either. Not here.
  • An asteroid is headed for us and what little money NASA has they are spending it on blowing up rocks. I'm glad you people are so calm about this plainly spelled out emergency. Fact is, NASA can't do anything against a 2 mile long rock. They should invest all that money in bomb shelters for the general population- and stop pretending to be anything more than scientific children.

    Your hubris are going to cost us lives. But they'll be dead, so nothing to worry about really- huh.

      • I hate to be the one to tell you this, but IF a 2 mile long rock was heading for the Earth, there is NOTHING we could do about it except wave bye-bye
        Maybe *you* can't do anything.

        Me, I can loot like a madman for a little while.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by yoprst (944706)
        According to this http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/ [arizona.edu] 2 mile long asteroid is going to shatter a lot of glass, but you've got to be 600 miles away or closer to suffer. In other words, most people will know about it from the news, or if they're sensitive they'll notice that some noise just passed by. A comet will be more noticeable, but not dramatically - they're made of ice, not iron + nickel.
        • Sorry, but when you have a 2 mile long iron asteroid striking at 20km/s at a 45 degree angle, you get a released energy yield of 6.67 x 10^6 MegaTons TNT, it won't matter WHERE on Earth you are. The burning ejected material that reenters all over the globe is putting your lights out for good. If you are lucky, you are close to ground zero. If not, you get to linger for a few hours. Does the name Pompeii ring a bell? Imagine that on a GLOBAL scale. It would be Asteroids 2, Earthlings 0.
            • Let's not forget that the entire atmosphere will be blacked out for YEARS from ejecta and smoke from all the fires set. Just like the previous extinctions. No food for years means a lot of mass starvation for those unlucky enough to survive. Not exactly something I would want to look forward to....
          • Earth is a really big thing. The farther you are from the impact point, the less energy reaches you are (it decreases faster than r^2). Just close the curtain. It happened on global scale, more than once. The thing that killed dinosaurs may have been up to 15 km wide. They weren't killed by ejecta (and they didn't even live within buildings!), they died because of the climate change (sometimes it sucks to be a cold-blooded creature).
    • I know your coment is modded "Funny," but I'm not sure you're kidding. In the case that you're serious:

      1) NASA has a budget less than that of the National Park Service. A total of 0.6% of the federal budget in 2006 (16 billion out of 2.4 trillion). Considering that space colonization will ensure the survival of the Human race, I don't think were wasting our money with it. Especially since the DoD spend a whopping $447 billion (24.5 times that of NASA's budget.)

      2) When did NASA become the Asteriod defense fo

  • Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whatme (997566) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:03PM (#18724499)
    I think examples of this are what we should petition congress to INCREASE funding for NASA. The simple fact is NASA has developed a culture to maximize their return on projects (and succeeding). Give them some more funds to accomplish the additional programs they have backlogged. If they can continue this culture, we all benefit.

    Too bad the rest of the government can't follow this lead.

    • Re:Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nyeerrmm (940927) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:23PM (#18724773)
      I'd point out that this is the science side of NASA (Jet Propulsion Labs [JPL] in particular.) Working with both JPL and JSC (more involved in the high budget manned missions) for space mission design classes, JPL has always been much better about staying on budget, and doing more with less. Also they're less egotistical and seem to actually enjoy and appreciate working with students.

      Obviously some of that is that manned missions are by necessity much more expensive, however, it's been my experience that there are also cultural issues. JSC sees itself as the crown jewels of NASA and behaves as such, spending more than necessary and generally looking down their noses at other facilities (I've heard stories of middle managers at JSC telling administrators of other facilities, who are brilliant PhDs that it might be too complicated for someone not at JSC.)

      That said I do applaud the guys at JPL for this wonderful use, and do hope they get some of their money back after they got robbed to pay for Return to Flight and Constellation.
    • NASA has certainly had a good impact on modern technology and culture, but for the past fifteen or twenty years, I haven't seen much progress from all the money that's been poured into NASA. The fact that NASA is reusing a satellite tells me that they're resourceful, not that they're productive or worth the money.

      Personally, I think space exploration would be most productive and most beneficial to society if left to the private sector - with some regulation for obvious safety reasons.

  • Sounds like a porn plot... (Score:5, Funny)

    by posterlogo (943853) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:04PM (#18724501)
    "Deep Impact Mission May Be Extended"


    Just think about it for a second...

  • Sooo.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hawthorne01 (575586) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:07PM (#18724549)

    putting it on a trajectory to reach comet Boethin in December 2008

    But it's out of projectiles, and won't blow up anything, so this time, many Boethins WON'T die to give us this information.

    /me ducks. ;-p

    • It's about time...

      I, for one, welcome our new Boethinian overlords.
    • The 'Boethin' Martyrs will die capturing the plans on the second Death Star, only to have their sacrifice used as political capital by Borsk Feylya? Even after it has been revealed that the Empire *wanted* the 'Boethin' to retrieve the plans, hoping to destroy the rebellion? And they're crashing a satellite into the 'Boethin' rock in space.. Bothawui? I thought anger over the Caamas document has subsided! Why are we attacking now? Sigh, I need sleep. And a girlfriend.

    • But it's out of projectiles, and won't blow up anything, so this time, many Boethins WON'T die to give us this information.

      The new plan is to upload the complete works of Celine Dion to Deep Impact's computers. If the satellite encounters any resistance, it will start playing at full volume until the Boethins surrender.

  • If they are successful... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Null Nihils (965047) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:08PM (#18724563) Journal

    ...putting it on a trajectory to reach comet Boethin in December 2008. ... (The probe only had one projectile though, so we will not see another brilliant man-made explosion on this comet.)
    That's too bad... otherwise NASA's leaders would be telling us "many Boethins died to bring us this information".

  • Conserve our angular momentum (Score:5, Funny)

    by isaac (2852) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:11PM (#18724607)
    Now is the time for all good Americans to stand up and say "NO!" to the political hacks at NASA (appointed by the criminal Bush regime) who want to steal Earth's precious angular momentum. And for what? A so-called scientific mission costing millions of dollars? There are millions of starving children on Earth, and they can't eat spectroscopic data!

    Using a gravitational slingshot around the Earth to accelerate this craft puts every human being on Earth at risk of falling space junk! And slowing Earth's orbit around the sun will lengthen our year - and you know what that means. Yep, more global warming, as more sunshine will reach Earth every year after this spacecraft passes.

    No! We must speak up and not allow this mission to proceed! Not in our name!

    -Isaac

    • Using a gravitational slingshot around the Earth to accelerate this craft puts every human being on Earth at risk...slowing Earth's orbit around the sun will lengthen our year - and you know what that means. Yep, more global warming

      The Dinosours had this problem and compensated by aiming a meteor strike in the opposite direction. But, they mixed up Triceratops units of volume with T.Rex units, and the roid was thus too big.
           

  • They needed more ammo (Score:5, Funny)

    by airship (242862) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:16PM (#18724691) Homepage
    They should have put a bitchin' bad multi-barrel probe launcher on that thing. Or maybe a machine-gun belt full of them.

    See, this is why NASA should hire gamers to design their space probes.

    • They should have put a bitchin' bad multi-barrel probe launcher on that thing. Or maybe a machine-gun belt full of them.

      See, this is why NASA should hire gamers to design their space probes.

      i would mod this "FUCKIN BRILLIANT!"...*sigh*but i blew my mod points bashing mac snobs...

  • a harebrained idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gsn (989808) on Friday April 13 2007, @04:18PM (#18724715)
    If wonder if they'd consider using the probe itself as the projectile and just monitoring with Spitzer...
  • The probe only had one projectile though, so we will not see another brilliant man-made explosion on this comet.

    At least this way there won't be another Russian lawsuit by some psychic over the Cosmic Consequences of beating up on comets again.

  • Despite numerous observations of comets that are anomalous to the mainstream traditional theory that comets have something to do with the early formation of the planets, NASA continues to prioritize the theory over the data. We already possess all of the data we need to understand what it is that makes comets tick. The real problem is that neither NASA nor the space enthusiasts (on this forum at least) like the answer because it is a square peg in a round theory of the universe:

    http://www.thunderbolts.inf [thunderbolts.info]
    • Fascinating stuff, man. I always read the "electric comets" stuff and shrugged it off as more crazy pseudoscientific nonsense, without ever delving into the actual theory. I just wish I was knowledgeable enough to make a fair comparison between this radical theory and the more traditional ones...I will have to read more....
      • Very few people are following it. This is a big problem because as time moves forward, evidence continues to mount in favor of the EU Theories. People on these boards are especially hostile and condescending towards the theory, but you shouldn't think much of it because very few of those people have actually read the materials. I've read a fair amount of it all and it's become clear to me that these people are not receiving a fair hearing. I have an electrical engineering background, which helps a littl
      • Trust me, its crap.

      • Thats the best laugh I've had this week. Everybody knows comets were created by An Intelligent Designer exactly 6000 years ago.

        Like many others, you are likely unaware that mainstream astrophysicists are the ones that have taken the unfortunate position that laboratory plasma physics do not apply to our observations of space. In the laboratory, plasma is an electrical phenomenon. Electric Universe Theorists allege nothing more than that plasma in space has electrical resistance like plasma on Earth in our

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