Stardust, part II

This post is way delayed, but I'll skip the excuses and get right down to it. I did finally manage to track down Professor Brownlee (see photo insert) in his office the other day. There I got to check out his cool model of Comet Tempel 1 (named after Wilhelm Tempel), it really looks like it has had some huge piece knocked off of it at some point. He showed me an animation of the satellites approach of the comet and we listened to the sounds of the debris impacting the satellite (you can find these here). I wish I had remembered to bring my camera, Brownlee's office is not the most pristine place, but there is always some neat stuff laying about (including fossils and meteorites!). As I didn't, you are left with the image and video I snagged from NASA. Also should have asked him more questions, then I'd actually have more to post about! However, I did ask where the tail or coma was, turns out when you are that close to the comet it isn't really visible. Which makes sense since it is a bit like a fog. The only malfunction/technical problem was that the satellite was only supposed to send back the images from the center of its run towards the comet (these are when it was the closest), instead it sent them all back, which meant the transmission took a lot longer and none of the scientist or technicians got any sleep that night. Not really a big deal though, all in all it was an amazingly successful venture!

One of the main things the satellite was checking out was the impact site of a man made crater (made in 2005), they wanted see what type of surface changes (if any) occurred on the comet. They were able to observe the crater and also some changes on an other feature. Actually the best way to get an idea of the whole mission is to listen to the NASA briefs (actually it will make most of my post a bit redundant!)