Group Photo: Artist's drawing of the crash process

    LOS ANGELES, July 2 (Xinhuanet)-- A spacecraft has successfully released its impactor that will bombard the comet Tempel 1 in 24 hours, US space agency NASA said Saturday night.

This NASA handout artist's drawing shows the image of Comet Tempel 1 after being crashed by impactor released from the spacecraft Deep Impact on 04 July, 2005. NASA aims to be the first to crash an object into a comet as it zooms past Earth, in the hope of unlocking the mysteries of our solar system's origins.(Photo: NASA)

    The Deep Impact spacecraft, which is about the size of a compact car, released the nearly 400kg impactor shortly before 23:00 PDT (1600 GMT) as planned, said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that's operating the project.

    Engineers confirmed that the maneuver was successful minutes later. They were checking the data, and said "everything appears to be going as planned."     

     The copper-fortified impactor is headed into the path of the Tempel 1 comet, which is hurtling through space at a speed of about 40,000 km per hour. The hyper-speed collision is set to occur at 22:52 PDT (1552 GMT) Sunday.

    The Deep Impact mission is intended to give scientists their first glimpse of the core of one of these space-borne icebergs, which could shed light on the origin of the solar system.

    The collision 133 million km from Earth could produce a crater. As planned, ice and debris will be blasted away in the crash, revealing primordial material thought to be unchanged since the solar system was formed.

    An array of ground and space-based observatories will be trained on southern skies, near the star Spica, where the crash isto occur. ¡¡

Related:

¡¤NASA: spacecraft prepared for Deep Impact

¡¤Deep Impact to uncover building blocks of life

¡¤ NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft observes major comet outburst

¡¤Hubble captures outburst of dust from comet Temple 1

¡¤Comet waiting for great smashup

¡¤Deep Impact takes 1st photo of target comet Tempel 1

¡¤Deep Impact on course with blurry vision

¡¤Deep Impact on safe cruise for comet-crash

¡¤Deep Impact on collision course for solar system's origin

¡¤NASA launches Deep Impact to probe solar system's origin

     "We are really threading the needle with this one," said Rick Grammier, the Deep Impact project manager. "In our quest of a great scientific payoff, we are attempting something never done before at speeds and distances that are truly out of this world."

    Two hours before the collision, the impactor will kick into autonomous navigation mode. It must perform its own navigational solutions and thruster firings to make contact with the comet, said the JPL.

    The crater produced by the collision could range from two to 14 stories deep. Meanwhile, the flyby spacecraft will be zipping along 500 km below the comet.

    Equipped with a camera, an infrared spectrometer, and a high-resolution telescope, the spacecraft will have about 13 minutes to collect data.

    If the craft survives, scientists hope it will transmit data for an additional month, then controllers will send it into an elliptical orbit.

    The impactor itself carries a camera that is meant to send back images up until the time it is run over by Tempel 1, according to the JPL.

    Astronomers estimate that billions of comets, composed of ice, rocks and dust, circle the sun at the far fringe of the solar system. They are the "undercooked leftovers that remained after a sprawling cloud of gas and dust condensed to form the sun and planets about 4.6 billion years ago," the JPL said.

    From time to time, some comets are pulled into the inner solar system by the gravitational tug of planets or other comets.

    By blasting a crater into one of these frozen leftover solar-system building blocks, scientists also hope to learn the basic structure of comets, including density. Enditem

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]