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Nasa gladly loses a spacecraft 
By Tim Radford
For thousands of years comets have been a 
mystery to man. They travel across the sky 
very fast and have a bright ‘tail’ of 
burning gas. The comet Tempel 1 has an 
orbit far outside the orbit of the furthest 
planet in our solar system, Pluto. It has 
been there for 4.6 billion years, 133 
million kilometres from Earth. Last week 
a little American spacecraft crashed into 
Tempel 1. The spacecraft had a camera 
and it took a photograph of the comet 
every minute before it finally crashed into 
its surface.
The space mission to Tempel 1 cost $335 
million and was called Deep Impact. The 
spacecraft was travelling at 37,000 
kilometres per hour when it hit the comet 
and the crash completely destroyed the 
spacecraft. But before it hit the comet, the 
spacecraft took some amazing 
photographs. The last one was a close-up 
picture which the spacecraft took just 3 
seconds before it crashed into the comet.
"Right now we have lost one spacecraft," 
said a delighted NASA engineer. Deep 
Impact was like an American 
Independence Day fireworks display. It 
took many years to plan and ended in an 
enormous explosion. 
The spacecraft which crashed into the 
comet was made of copper and was the 
size of a washing machine. It was dropped 
from a mothership into the path of the 
comet and the mothership then 
photographed the cloud of ice, dust and 
organic chemicals that rose from the 
surface of the comet after the crash. 
The crash completely destroyed the 
spacecraft but nothing really happened to 
the comet: experts believe that the crash 
slowed the comet down by no more than 
1/10,000
th
of a millimetre a second. The 
aim of the mission was to study for the 
first time the interior of a comet. 
The mothership was 480km from the 
explosion and observed the crash and the 
explosion with instruments for 800 
seconds. Seven satellites, including the 
Hubble space telescope, watched the 
moment of drama, and over the next day 
and night about 50 telescopes on Earth 
were watching the distant comet.
The first people to produce pictures in 
Britain were pupils from King's school, 
Canterbury. They used information from 
the 2m Faulkes telescope in Hawaii, a 
telescope used by schools. Scientists from 
the US and around the world were 
delighted. For the first time, they had clear 
and close-up pictures of a comet.
Comets like Halley’s Comet which visit 
the Earth frequently are not so interesting 
for scientists. But comets like Tempel 1 
are so distant that they could hold the 
secrets of the planets, the Earth's oceans 
and even of the original organic chemistry 
from which life developed. "If you are 
thinking of comets as possible sources of 
organic material, then you are looking for 
the organic elements carbon, hydrogen, 
oxygen, nitrogen," said John Zarnecki of 
the Open University.
For Andrew Coates of the Mullard space 
science laboratory of University College 
London, Deep Impact was a fantastic 
success. "You have the comet getting 
bigger and bigger in the field of view, the 
level of detail on the comet getting better 
and better," he said. "We know that 
comets produce jets. What we have now is 
the first artificial jet from a comet," he 
added. "The fact that there are craters tells 
us the surface must be solid in some way. 
This is going to be really exciting."
The Guardian Weekly 15/07/2005, page 19 
©
Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2005 
Taken from the 
Magazine 
section in 
www.onestopenglish.com

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