NASA's Deep Impact Mission and the History of Comet Missions

As some of you may already know, NASA's Deep Impact mission is scheduled for its impact with Comet Tempel 1 at 1:52 a.m. EDT tomorrow morning. (I'll probably be asleep when it happens.)

The first comet to be visited by a spacecraft was Comet Giacobini-Zimmer, which was observed by the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) on September 11, 1985. I remember following the comet mission when I was a teenager, because Comet Halley (pronounced HAL-ley, not HALL-ley) was coming back to our part of the solar system in 1986.

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Tomorrow belongs to NASA's Deep Impact Mission, a spacecraft about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle, which has already released an impactor spacecraft about the size of a living room coffee table. Eighty-three million miles away from us, the 820-pound impactor will hit Tempel 1's nucleus at a speed of roughly 23,000 miles per hour and bore into the surface. Back in 1986, Giotto gave a chance to see what the exterior of a comet's nucleus looked like; now we're about to find out what it's like inside.

Hang on. It's going to be a bumpy ride.


References:

• NASA's Official Deep Impact Mission Page
  
  
• ESA - Rosetta - History of Cometary Missions