CAPE CANAVERAL - Deep
Impact is on track to smash its impactor into a comet July 4, but its
high-resolution camera's focus is still imperfect.
"The state of the
spacecraft is excellent," project manager Rick Grammier said of the $330
million NASA mission. "All systems are nominal."
Deep Impact has two more
maneuvers planned to make sure it's on target. The spacecraft will release its
smart impactor a day before the collision, set for 1:52 a.m. EDT on July 4, a
time that could change slightly as the encounter approaches.
The only disappointment so
far is the High Resolution Instrument, the telescopic camera that was to
provide detailed pictures of Comet Tempel 1 and the impact.
It will still take
pictures, but their clarity will be reduced by a factor of four, close to the
quality of those provided by the Medium Resolution Instrument on the flyby
spacecraft, Grammier said. There's also a targeting camera on the impactor.
Still, they'll be the best
images taken of a comet, he said, and the team has high hopes that computer
processing of the pictures will help. "We're pretty confident . . . that
we can get essentially back to what they originally expected," he said.
The blurriness is still
under investigation, but a possible cause may lie in optics used to test the
camera's focus before flight.
"I've got the team
concentrating on the end game right now," Grammier said.
Deep Impact's images of the
collision and the resulting debris are expected to unveil the ancient guts of
the comet, which is thought to have come from the primordial, icy bodies of the
Kuiper Belt, on the edge of the solar system.
"They're very
confident," Grammier said of his team. "We're all getting very
excited, because we know it's coming down to the impact time, so it's a lot of
years of previous work that everybody's looking forward to seeing the fruits
of."
The spacecraft, managed by
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, launched Jan. 12 from Cape
Canaveral.
Published under license from FLORIDA
TODAY. Copyright © 2005 FLORIDA TODAY. No portion of this material
may be reproduced in any way without the written consent of FLORIDA TODAY.
advertisement
