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Thanks for your interest guys. Here's afew more items of interest.
According to the CSIRO; before the impact the comet will not be bright enough to see with the unaided eye. The impact may brighten it, but by how much is unknown. By the time the sun sets in eastern Australia it will be high in the sky, almost due north.
Very little is known about comet Tempel 1. In fact, very little is known about comets generally. This is the point of this mission. By looking at the pristine nucleus scientists hope to get a better understanding of what a comet is made of. In Australia CSIRO's radio telescopes will be watching. Radio telescopes can work in daylight and so scientists will be able to watch the comet at the time of the impact, and for the following seven hours.
Deep Impact is the first mission to make contact with a comet’s surface. The hope is to produce a crater in the large comet and reveal what is underneath. Comet Temple 1 is moving at about 108,000 kilometres per hour and the ejected 372-kilogram impactor will be speeding at roughly 37,000 kilometers per hour towards it, creating a crater perhaps 200 meters wide and 50 meters deep.
Deep Impact should be able to look into the new crater for almost 15 minutes before it speeds away. It could get hit with shrapnel and suffer irreparable damage.. no-one knows what will happen!
At the moment of impact, Comet Tempel 1 will be situated about 3½ degrees to the east-northeast of the bluish first-magnitude star, Spica in Virgo. Just locate Jupiter if you can in the daylight and you'll spot Spica very closeby.
The comet glows like a 10th magnitude star at best. Comet Tempel 1 might become 15 to 40 times brighter in the hours immediately after the impact. The damage to the comet by Deep Impact may create a cloud of meteoroids, objects larger than the gas and dust that NASA predicts.
According to Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “Depending on how the kinetic energy of the impact will be distributed, there is a real possibility that sufficient internal gas pressure builds up to break the comet apart".
WOW, now that's a worry! But there's no real cause for alarm, in the event that any meteoroid material is released, it will be mild and won't come anywhere near us.They won’t knock the comet off into a collision course with Earth. Just for the record - Bruce Willis is NOT onboard.
As a foonote, I believe, due to the distance involved, there should be a time delay of about 7 minutes until the info reaches us after the event, BUT don't quote me exact on that... it's just a quick calculation.
Hope all this helps and I know one thing, it's gonna' make the news on Monday. To ving, cahullian, ballaratdragons, xstream, et al - good luck with it all.
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