Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – your weekly window, where web matters. I am your Cybershost Steven Lang, taking you this week into outer space – more precisely to a point in space about 133 million kilometres away.

In a few moments time – and by that I mean soon after the end of Cybersurf – but before the eight o clock news – one of the most daring and spectacular space experiments will explode in front of all the major telescopes on earth.

A fridge sized impactor – or part of a spaceship is going to slam into comet Tempel one at a speed of around 37 thousand kilometres per hour. It is expected that the collision will create a crater in the comet big enough to put a whole soccer stadium.

Now this is beyond spectacular – and you can see it all “live” on the internet at the following address:

http://www.noao.edu/news/deep-impact/ - I’ll repeat that for luck. The Kitts Peak observatory will be sending out images live from the following address: http://www.noao.edu/news/deep-impact/

I am sure that the traffic to this site will be incredibly heavy but, I suspect that the NASA boffins will have put in some ultra-serious hardware to cope with the traffic.

If you don’t manage to get to the site within the next few seconds, it will certainly still be worth your while because the Deep Impact space craft that released the impactor into the comet will be taking pictures for thirteen minutes after impact.

This means that we should be able to see all the debris being ejected from the comet and heading towards Deep Impact, about five hundred kilometres away from the crash site.

Besides this – it is also certain that all three telescopes in orbit around our earth, and all major telescopes on our planet will be trained on Tempel one for as long as the after-effects of the impact are still visible.

Now the obvious question people will ask is what is the purpose of smashing a spacecraft into a comet that is about 15 km long by about 5 kilometres wide?

Well the crude answer is to see what’s inside – just as geologists smash open rocks to find out what’s inside – well this is just one of those big rocks.

Other explanations include finding out about the building blocks of our solar system; finding out about the consistency of the comet – is it a solid rock; solid ice or just a loose agglomeration of rocks and ice.

We don’t know now, but we should have a pretty good idea in about an hour or so.

Another bit of interesting research concerns the extent to which the collision affects the trajectory of the comet - if at all. Many astronomers have proposed using an explosive missile on a comet or asteroid that threatened to crash into earth – one of the big questions is “what kind of explosion would be required to have the desired effect?”. Maybe the Deep Impact mission will provide some information in that line.

If you are interested in finding out more about the collision and any related research - I suggest that your first stop should be at the NASA Deep Impact site at: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/main/index.html -

Next you should also take a look at the European Space Observatory site at deepimpact.eso.org/ that is deepimpact.eso.org/ - and of course the ESO stands for European Space Obseratory

Do not stress if you couldn’t write those addresses down in time because, I will post these and other useful URLs on the Cybersurf Blog – which you will find at www.cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time www.cybersurf.blogspot.com –

That’s it for today, thanks for listening and remember to tune in again next week same time, same place for more Cybersurf.

Relevant Links:

• NASA Deep Impact mission
• European Space Observatory - Deep Impact
• Kitts Peak Observatory
• University of Maryland - Deep Impact