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May 11, 2003A childhood dream realized...
If you ever played "Asteroids" or frittered something away in a time capsule as a kid, you're going to love this…
An upcoming NASA/JPL project—named "Deep Impact," just like that horrible movie from a few years back—will involve slinging the kinetic equivalent of 4.8 tons of TNT at a comet (Tempel 1, specifically) to see what happens. The expected crater will be about the circumference of a football stadium, and anywhere from seven to 15 stories deep.
But wait, there's more!
Through February 2004, NASA is letting people register over the Internet to have their name included on a disk they're placing upon the impactor craft. In other words, your name can be right there when we backhand Tempel 1 in the name of science.
But there's still more!
After you've completed the registration process—an arduous, one-step process that will take you all of ten seconds—the website pulls up a personalized Participation Certificate that you can print out!
It's about damn time, NASA. Seriously, if they'd let Joe Six-Pack help them take potshots at comets all along, their budget never would have atrophied to the point where tragedies like the Columbia were bound to eventually occur for lack of funds.
Click here to go to Deep Impact's home page.
Click here to go straight to the registration page.
Click here to see my Participation Certificate!
Posted by patrick at May 11, 2003 09:47 PM
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