Word: cometted
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There ought to be plenty of fireworks this Fourth of July. But the best pyrotechnics show is likely to take place 268 million miles away, when a probe fired from the Deep Impact spacecraft is scheduled to collide with Comet Tempel 1, a nine-mile-long rock roaring through space at 66,880 m.p.h. The planned cosmic crack-up will gouge out a football-field-size crater and may be visible from the U.S. Pacific Coast and points west. It may also reveal a lot about the chemistry of comets, fossils of the early solar system...
Deep Impact is really a craft and a half: an SUV-size mother ship and a smaller impactor--basically a guided missile equipped with a targeting system and a camera. Early on July 3, when the paired machines are 24 hours from the comet, the mother ship is set to release the impactor to free-fly the last 500,000 miles. If all goes well, the probe and comet should collide at 1:52 a.m. E.T. on July 4, producing the same explosive bang as 4.5 tons of TNT. The mother ship, trailing a safe 310 miles behind, will photograph...
There's no danger that the distant detonation will send the comet tumbling our way. The probe will be like a bug on Tempel 1's windshield, changing its speed by 0.014 in./hr. --With reporting by Dan Cray/Pasadena...
...spacecraft first detects the comet when it?s still 60 days away. The ship begins refining its aim, studying the comet?s rotation and ambient dust...
Giotto's grand finale was preceded by the flybys of the second Soviet Vega and two Japanese craft. Early in the week, Vega 2 passed 5,125 miles from the comet's nucleus, sending back 700 pictures and confirming that the nucleus was solid. But the dust clouds encountered by the craft disabled nearly half of its solar panels and two of its experiments...