Say what?
They seem to be saying that the comet has a huge electircal potential difference from the impactor, sufficient to produce energy comparable to that of the kinetic energy of the impact.
I don't suppose the remaining 7 kilos of thruster fuel had anything to do with a larger than expected result?
We'll see.
"It is possible that this new era also means a partial return to more understandable physics. For the nonspecialists, four-dimensional relativity theory and the indeterminism of atom structure have always been mystic and difficult to understand. I believe that it is easier to explain the 33 instabilities in plasma physics or the resonance structure of the solar system. The increased emphasis on the new fields means a certain demystification of physics. In the spiral or trochoidal motion which science makes during the centuries, its guiding center has returned to these regions from where it started.
It was the wonders of the night sky, observed by Indians, Sumerians, or Egyptians, that started science several thousand years ago. It was the question why the wanderers - the planets - moved as they did that triggered off the scientific avalanche several hundred years ago. The same objects are now again in the center of science - only the questions we ask are different. We now ask how to go there, and we also ask how these bodies once were formed.
And if the night sky on which we observe them is at a high latitude, outside this lecture hall - perhaps over a small island in the archipelago of Stockholm - we may also see in the sky an aurora, which is a cosmic plasma, reminding us of the time when our world was born out of plasma. Because in the beginning was the plasma."
H. Alfvõp Science 4 June 1971. From a lecture he delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, on 11 Dec 1970 when he received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Heeeey, thanks!
The Big Splash:
A Scientific Discovery That Revolutionizes the Way We View the Origin of Life,
the Water We Drink, the Death of the Dinosaurs, the Creation of the Oceans,
the Nature of the Cosmos, and the Very Future of the Earth Itself
by Louis A. Frank
with Patrick Huyghe
Sigwarth and I analyzed over 10,000 images and learned a good deal about the black spots in the process. Our interpretation of the events continued to involve meteor impacts into Earth's upper atmosphere.By counting the spots in our images we were able to estimate the rate at which these objects appeared. This was the simplest measurement to do. We saw ten holes per minute on the daylight side of Earth. So we doubled that figure to obtain the rate of these objects over the entire face of Earth. There had to be about twenty such objects entering the atmosphere every minute. That was an alarming number of objects.
Deep Impact space collision reveals comets to be fluffy balls of powder
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Wednesday September 7, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1564135,00.html
