2:46 a.m. EDT July 4, 2005
Flyby should have come out of shield mode and swung itself back toward Earth to send images back to eager mission scientists, flight software engineer Anne Elson said.
Don Yeomans, a mission co-investogator, said Flyby's continued observations are just as important as the final shots of Impactor.
Don Yeomans, a mission co-investogator, said Flyby's continued observations are just as important as the final shots of Impactor. The spacecraft's cameras and spectrometers will now look at the ejecta to study Tempel 1's composition.
"The big question is how did we make this big a splash," Yeomans said of the impact. "Now you can look at the material that blasts out onto the surface, and that's what our [infrared] spectroscopy people hope to do."
Mission manager Dave Spencer thanked the Deep Impact team for all their hard work.
From Senior Space Writer Leonard David reporting from Boulder, Colorado:
“I just can’t believe it. It’s absolutely incredible,” said Alice Phinney, Lead Mechanical Design Engineer for the Impactor at Ball Aerospace. She was one of over 600 company colleagues and friends that gathered here at Fiske Planetarium here in Boulder, Colorado. Ball Aerospace is located here.
Phinney told SPACE.com that she worked on the Impactor that smashed into the comet for some two years. One of her key jobs was maximizing the use of copper in the Impactor design.
The task was not as straight-forward as it would seem. “There were a lot of assumptions. Scientists were all over the map,” Phinney said regarding the overall composition of Comet Tempel 1.
“That’s why I love engineering…at some point you’ve got to make a decision.” The Impactor “worked like a champ,” Phinney said.
