Life is about journeys – here’s a spectacular example
Yesterday while I was travelling the 5,450 flight miles between London Heathrow and Los Angeles airports, another marvel of flight technology approached a small lump of rock far out in space. I speaking of NASA’s Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft passing within 450 miles of the Comet Hartley 2.
“There are billions of comets in the solar system, but this will be only the fifth time a spacecraft has flown close enough to one to snap pictures of its nucleus,” says Lori Feaga of the EPOXI science team. “This one should put on quite a show!”
Cometary orbits tend to be highly elongated; they travel far from the sun and then swing much closer. At encounter time, Hartley 2 will be nearing the sun and warming up after its cold, deep space sojourn. The ices in its nucleus will be vaporizing furiously – spitting dust and spouting gaseous jets.
“Hartley 2’s nucleus is small, less than a mile in diameter,” says Feaga. “But its surface offgasses at a higher rate than nuclei we’ve seen before. We expect more jets and outbursts from this one.”
The EPOXI Mission website is here, from which has been selected this photograph of the Comet.
The details of this photograph are:
Caption: This EPOXI mission image of comet 103P/Hartley 2 was taken 34 days from Encounter (E-34d) using the Medium Resolution Instrument (MRI) and a clear filter. Science Team member Dr. Dennis Wellnitz combined three successive one-minute exposures to make this single image. The mid-exposure time was 2010/10/01 16:22:51 UTC. The comet was 1.12 AU from the Sun and 0.23 AU (35 million km) from the spacecraft.
Of course, when this Post is published, automagically, you will have to go onto the mission website to see the very latest information.
I will be more interested in catching a South-West airline flight into Phoenix.
By Paul Handover
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