NASA hopes to give astronomers their first peek at the inside of a comet by blasting a stadium-sized hole through one of the heavenly bodies. <\/p>\n
If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1, which will be about 130 million kilometres from Earth at the time of impact. Scientists hope the July 4 collision will gouge a crater in the comet\u2019s surface large enough to reveal its pristine core and perhaps yield cosmic clues to the origin of the solar system.<\/p>\n <\/font>The comet is about 28km2.<\/p>\n Nasa\u2019s fleet of space-based observatories \u2013 including the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra telescopes \u2013 and an army of ground-based telescopes around the world are expected to record the impact and resulting crater.<\/p>\n The big question is: What kind of fireworks can sky-gazers expect to see from Earth?<\/p>\n Scientists do not know yet. But if the probe hits the bull\u2019s-eye, the impact could temporarily light up the comet as much as 40 times brighter than normal, possibly making it visible to the naked eye in parts of the western hemisphere.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re getting closer by the minute,\u201d Andrew Dantzler, director of Nasa\u2019s solar system division, said earlier this month. \u201cI\u2019m looking forward to a great encounter on the fourth of July.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NASA hopes to give astronomers their first peek at the inside of a comet by blasting a stadium-sized hole through one of the heavenly bodies. If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1, which will be about 130 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cIt\u2019s a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with a third bullet in the right place at the right time,\u201d said Rick Grammier, project manager at Nasa\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.<\/p>\n