Thursday, July 17, 2008

Home From a Distance

Couple of cool video clips from the Deep Impact satellite. Taken from a distance of 31 million miles, these show the moon passing between the satellite and Earth. The first is a red-green-blue color composite; the second is an infrared-blue-green composite.

Deep Impact's primary mission was to rendezvous with comet Tempel 1 about three years ago; at that time it fired a metal probe at the comet, which impacted at a high speed, and created an explosion that allowed the main satellite to gather data on the comet's composition. The clips linked above allow scientists to better understand what kinds of data would enable us to recognize earth-like planets around other stars. Full article at SpaceDaily.

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