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NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus. The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet's atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT,...

Shortly after closest approach, Stardust turned its antenna toward Earth to begin the downlink. The playback was delayed an hour due to inclement weather at a ground station in Spain. When the close-up images didn't show up as planned, project leaders were seen pacing around mission control or huddling in groups to troubleshoot. Space enthusiasts who stayed up all night watching the coverage streamed over the Internet by NASA grew weary and signed off from Twitter and other social networking sites after failing to get an up-close peek.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host several live media activities for the Stardust-NExT mission's close encounter with comet Tempel 1. The closest approach is expected at approximately 8:37 p.m. PST, with confirmation received on Earth at about 8:56 p.m. PST on Monday, Feb. 14. Live coverage of the Tempel 1 encounter will begin at 8:30 p.m. Feb. 14 on NASA Television and the agency's website. The coverage will include live commentary from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and video from Lockheed Martin Space System's mission support area in Denver. A news briefing is planned...

During the encounter, Stardust will take dozens of high-resolution images of Tempel 1′s nucleus and coma, a fuzzy halo of gas and dust. It will also use its two dust detectors to measure the size and makeup of dust grains. The spacecraft is equipped with a protective shield to deflect potentially dangerous particles as it zips past.

Two of the most common materials found in Tempel 1 are an iron-silicon mineral called ferrosilite and a glassy form of a magnesium-iron mineral called olivine, which make up 33% and 17% of the comet, respectively, according to observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope. However, these minerals are entirely absent from the Wild 2 samples analysed so far... It is not clear how to explain this difference, says Stardust mission leader Donald Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, US. But he says one possibility is that the material on Tempel 1 was chemically modified by ancient collisions --...

Although comets form at the frigid edges of the solar system, they appear somehow to contain minerals that form only in the presence of liquid water, and at much warmer temperatures, scientists are reporting today. On July 4, as planned, part of the Deep Impact spacecraft - essentially an 820-pound, washing machine-size bullet - slammed into the comet Tempel 1 at 23,000 miles an hour. The collision tossed up thousands of tons of ice and dust from the comet that were observed by telescopes on Earth as well as small flotilla of spacecraft. One of the observers was the Spitzer...

NASA's film of the impact are incredible. One from the impactor and one from the fly-by craft. Look here: http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121530main_its_approach_x4.mov http://www.nasa.gov/mov/121527main_MRI_impact.mov Watch the one from the impactor. Early in the film, the camera seems to aquire a target, as it was probably supposed to do by design. Keep watching frame by frame. You will see two large craters come into clear view at the center section of the frame. As it gets closer, it seems to target a spot just below the upper crater. Just south south west of the craters looks like a frozen lake. It is very much...

All times are Eastern U.S. time July 3, Sunday 7 a.m. – 10 a.m. - Deep Impact Pre-Impact Live Interviews - JPL (One-Way Media Interviews) 2 p.m. – 3 p.m. – Deep Impact Pre-Impact Update - JPL(Update on separation and navigation) 4 p.m. – Deep Impact Pre-Impact Update - HQ (Replay) 7 p.m. – Deep Impact Pre-Impact Update - HQ (Replay) 11:30 p.m. – 3:30 a.m. (July 4) – Deep Impact Commentary (Expected time of impact: 1:52 a.m.) July 4, Monday 4 a.m. – 5 a.m. – Deep Impact Post-Impact Press Conference - JPL (Interactive Media Briefing) 7 a.m. –...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - A NASA spacecraft was speedily closing in on its target Friday, a comet scientists hope to smash open this weekend, producing celestial fireworks for the Independence Day weekend. But the real purpose is to study the comet's primordial core. Mission scientists said the Deep Impact spacecraft was 1 1/2 million miles away from Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan. "We're closing in very rapidly, but we're still very far away," said Michael A'Hearn, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and principal investigator of the $333 million project. The cosmic fireworks will...

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LOS ANGELES (AP) - Not all dazzling fireworks displays will be on Earth this Independence Day. NASA hopes to shoot off its own celestial sparks in an audacious mission that will blast a stadium-sized hole in a comet half the size of Manhattan. It would give astronomers their first peek at the inside of one of these heavenly bodies. If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1 - about 80 million miles away from Earth at the time of impact. "It's a bullet...

Comet-hitting probe tweaks its course to target NASA NEWS RELEASE Posted: May 15, 2005 Fifty-nine days before going head-to-head with comet Tempel 1, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully executed the second trajectory correction maneuver of the mission. The burn further refined the spacecraft's trajectory, or flight path, and also moved forward the expected time of the Independence Day comet encounter so impact would be visible by ground- and space-based observatories. The 95-second burn - the longest remaining firing of the spacecraft's motors prior to comet encounter -- was executed on May 4. It changed Deep Impact's speed by 18.2 kilometers...

If you've ever wanted your name on a comet, now's your chance. Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA plan to send a satellite to crash into a comet in 2005 and aboard the craft will be a CD with the names of perhaps thousands of Earthlings. The names will be carried on board NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, the first deep-space mission designed to collide with a comet. Mission scientists are confident an impact on the nucleus of a comet called Tempel 1 will answer basic questions about the nature and composition of these celestial wanderers. "This is an opportunity...