Posted on 12/31/2005 6:39:42 PM PST by Coleus
It's a match made in heaven: Jessica Sunshine and comet Tempel 1.
The geologist, a Tenafly native with an asteroid named after her, never expected to meet this kind of celestial body. But talent and dumb luck landed her on NASA's Deep Impact mission that might reveal the building blocks of the universe.
The $333 million project involves an impactor, fired from a mother ship, hurtling at 23,000 mph and crashing smack dab into the comet a little before 2 a.m. on Monday, creating a massive crater up to 14 stories deep.
Through a telescope, the cosmic union won't look like much more than a fuzzy blob getting brighter.
But that's where Sunshine comes in.
She will lead a spectrometer team to interpret the peaks and valleys of squiggly lines. Their data, collected at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will reveal the makeup of the comet's innards.
Sunshine sounds giddy, as though the event were a long-anticipated blind date.
"There is the potential we may owe our very existence to comets," she said excitedly, explaining that the interior of a comet has never been seen.
Comets are like wallflowers on the outskirts of the solar system, coaxed toward the sun only if gravity is just right. They've been there for 4.6 billion years, since the solar system was formed. Little is known about them, except that they are likely frozen balls of ice, rocks and dust that could have been planets had there been more material.
In a recent telephone interview from her California laboratory, Sunshine recalled an exciting moment that came last week. During a routine morning meeting, she casually glanced at some of the first readouts that came from the Deep Impact spacecraft that was launched by rocket into space in January.
They weren't expecting to see anything yet, but there was an unexpected change in the atmosphere surrounding the comet.
"We were doing the whole thing where we're trying to focus on the meeting but we can't wait to look at the data," she said.
It turned out there was an outburst when ice from the comet turned to gas. "That was exciting," she said. "A small taste for when we whack the thing."
Sunshine had always been into math and science, and decided what to concentrate on while studying at Brown University.
"She took some kind of geology course," said her mother, Silvia. "It wasn't a rocks-for-jocks type thing. ... It was for people who are in heavy science." The training stuck. "They wooed her," Silvia said of the geologists. Sunshine stayed at Brown to complete her master's and doctorate.
"She was one of their little stars."
Sunshine credits Tenafly with her success.
"That's where I became interested in science and math," explained the former Maugham School student and Tenafly High School graduate. "They were able to teach me why you want to do these things." And she's passing on her information to her children, Alexander, 10, and Micah, 5.
As soon as they were old enough, she said, she took them out to gaze at the moon. "I'd point and say 'See the impact crater?'Ÿ" she said. While on project Deep Impact, she has made presentations at Alexander's school and has given Micah lots of photos to take for show and tell.
"I definitely got the cool mom of the year award," she said with a laugh.
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