How We Hit That Sucker: The Story of Deep Impact
By William M. Owen Jr.
http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/LXIX4/deepimpact.pdf


Larry Klaes provided a link to the article about the Deep Impact mission.
When you go there notice that this is the archive site for the Caltech
Engineering and Science quarterly magazine and has a lot of interesting
articles going back as far as 1997.  They have been publishing since 1937.
That is as long as I have been around too. :-)
http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/ 
- LRK -

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>From Larry Klaes

Caltech's Engineering and Science quarterly magazine has an article in its
latest edition about Deep Impact.

Go here and scroll down to the first Features section:

http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/ESarchive-frame.html

Snip
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My thanks to Larry Klaes for the above information.  I found the article
very interesting.  There is information about Comet 9P or Temple 1 as it is
known.  There is information about how you figure out how to get to a target
in space, as well as how you plan for things that can and will go wrong.
All very nicely explained with diagrams and images in a light hearted way.
Enjoy!
- LRK -


Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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Larry Klaes says, " Go here and scroll down to the first Features section:

http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/ESarchive-frame.html "

Or select the link below.
- LRK -

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http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/LXIX4/deepimpact.pdf
How We Hit That Sucker: The Story of Deep Impact
By William M. Owen Jr.

"It's a big bullet with a small bullet hitting a comet.
So Dr. Owen, how did they hit that sucker?" - Le Val Lund

"YOU WANT TO DO WHAT??!!"

In a fit of irrational exuberance on the Fourth of July 2005, our project
manager Rick Grammier yelled out, "We hit that sucker!"

How do we make a hit like that? To paraphrase the bridgekeeper in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail, we just had to answer these questions three:
First, what was our quest, or where did we want to go? That falls under the
general heading of mission design. Second, where in space were we, and where
was our target? That's orbit determination, which is where I fit into the
scheme. And what could we do about getting to our target? That's maneuver
analysis.

Before we get into how Deep Impact did it, we need a little bit of
background. As always at the start of a mission, we begin with the science
objectives.  In our case, the requirements were, "We want to hit a comet."
At JPL, the reaction was, "You want to do WHAT??!!" The principal
investigator, Michael A'Hearn at the University of Maryland, planned this
mission to improve our knowledge of key properties of a comet's nucleus by
means of a massive impact at high velocity. In other words, he wanted to
make a crater in order to directly assess the interior properties of a comet
and figure out what it is made of. Every time a comet sails past the sun, it
loses a little bit of material, which is what makes its tail. But if we
could dig a hole deep enough, we would excavate to a pristine level that
hasn't been perturbed the way the surface has. The underlying material
preserves the primordial ingredients from which the planets of our solar
system condensed some 4.5 billion years ago.

Snip
[11 pages, 985 KB]
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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