Comets will never look the same now that NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft has successfully slammed into one of the icy wanderers in full view of orbital observatories, ground-based telescopes and skywatchers around the world.

Deep Impact’s Impactor probe crashed into Comet Tempel 1 at 1:52 a.m. EDT (0552 GMT) on July 4, 2005 while its Flyby mothership observed the event. The crash generated a wealth of images that spurred loud cheers at Deep Impact mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“It was a pretty incredible day,” Monte Henderson, mission program manager for Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. which built the Deep Impact spacecraft, told SPACE.com.

“It is hard to believe something so tightly choreographed and complicated went so smoothly.” He said it was doubly gratifying to have a successful mission that gave the science community high quality data that exceeded their expectations.

What follows are just some of the myriad of stunning images produced from Deep Impact’s collision with Tempel 1 and the many observations that recorded the event.

-- Tariq Malik and Leonard David