Jul 5
Nerds of the world celebrate
They managed to whack a far-distant comet with a probe filled with explosives that was the size of a fridge. It made a nice bang and produced lots of dust to study. Who says that scientists don’t know how to have fun on the 4th?
Course some people don’t think this such a good idea.
Sir – Can anyone explain to me and millions of poor people around the world, just what is the point of space exploration? Reading and watching the pictures of Deep Impact crashing into a comet, I just can’t see how mankind has benefited from all the billions of pounds, dollars, roubles etc that have been thrown into space – apart from satellites; it just seems a complete waste of money.Andy Stretton, Bedworth, Warks
And I rather hope that they letter above the one above is taking the micky.
1 Comment so far
Wun’t explosive-filled. At the sort of speed that the impactor had when it hit comet Temple 1, a kilo of TNT has a lot more kinetic energy than chemical energy. For TNT (specific explosive energy = 4.18 10^6 J/kg) K.E. dominates over explosive energy when velocity exceeds about 2900 m/s. The impact velocity of >10 km/s was significantly in excess of this.
You’re dead on about the carping idiots. I was going to blog about this but couldn’t summon the energy. One tosser on the Beeb’s web site was banging on about what a waste of money when there were starving people in Africa yada yada. If you ask me, Geldof would have been better off ditching his daft Live8 nonsense and using the concert to raise money for space probes.