- Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Maryland/Cornell
Scientists are elated given the imagery and other data relayed to Earth during NASA’s Stardust-New Exploration of Tempel 1 (Stardust-NExT) February 14 flyby of a previously visited comet.
“This mission is 100 percent successful,” said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. “We saw a lot of new things that we didn’t expect, and we’ll be working hard to figure out what Tempel 1 is trying to tell us.”
Scientists unveiled side by side images showing the before-and-after comparison of the part of comet Tempel 1 that was hit by the impactor unleashed from NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft several years ago.
The left-hand image (above) is a composite made from images obtained by Deep Impact in July 2005. The right-hand image shows arrows identifying the rim of the crater caused by the impactor.
The crater is estimated to be 500 feet (150 meters) in diameter. This image also shows a brighter mound in the center of the crater likely created when material from the impact fell back into the crater.
“We see a crater with a small mound in the center, and it appears that some of the ejecta went up and came right back down,” said Pete Schultz of Brown University, Providence, R.I. “This tells us this cometary nucleus is fragile and weak based on how subdued the crater is we see today.”
By LD/CSE