Predictions on ?Deep Impact?

Well said. The thing that I like about "Bad Astronomy" is that it's so appropriately named.

I just went back there to look for his comments on Louis Frank. NASA verified Frank's data on minicomet impacts in the upper atmosphere, but Plait still rejected it. Now he says that he accepts it, and has a page talking about the 1997 NASA study. The date at the top of the page (boldface) is 1997. In small print at the bottom is "This page last modified Tuesday, 21-Dec-2004". Plait was still rejecting the conclusion the last time I'd checked his site, and there's no way I'd ever heard of the site in 1997. My first visit there was via a site which blew apart the "Moon landings were hoaxed" hoax.

I hadn't heard of Louis Frank until, hmm, 1999 or 2000. In October 2001, Phil Plait wrote:

Louis Frank is as wrong as wrong can be. I have seen his claims, read papers, and years ago decided his claims are utterly incorrect... The bottom line is that we should see them, lots of them, all the time. We can't. So, unless they are magic (like Nancy Lieder's Planet X), they don't exist.

Notice the damning by association? That's a hallmark of pseudoscience, regardless of the number of dots and letters behind one's name. He prefaces the above with:

My Bitesize essays about Frank were written early on, when I first heard of his claims. I should really re-write them, or append them.

He has rewritten them. And yet, when one goes to the very page he mentions, the date is "Week of June 2, 1997". And we find no link back to his forum message from 2001, where he'd decided "years ago" (presumably at least four years earlier, when the NASA study was made) that Louis Frank "is as wrong as wrong can be."

To hijack some George Bernard Shaw bon mot, "skepticism might be a wonderful thing if anyone would ever try it."

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.

Nature of comets reconsidered
Southwest Research Institute
August 8, 2003
"It also now seems inevitable that most comets from the Kuiper Belt, though constructed of ancient material, cannot themselves be ancient -- instead they must be 'recently' created chips off larger Kuiper Belt Objects, formed as a result of violent impacts," says Stern. "This is truly a paradigm shift. Many of the short-period comets we see aren't even ancient!"

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some oldies:

Comet Cloud May Be Quite Thin
by Vanessa Thomas
In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort noticed these comets come from every direction and have orbits that reach about 50,000 astronomical units (AU) away from the sun. Paul Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute believe that many of the planetesimals that planetary scientists thought were ejected into the Oort Cloud actually were pulverized while still among the giant planets. Computer models by Stern and Weissman show that most of the large chunks and other debris were destroyed in collisions amongst themselves before the giant planets had a chance to use their gravitational influence to whip survivors out toward the solar system's edge.
Jupiter's Composition Throws Planet-formation Theories into Disarray
by Robert Roy Britt
Examining four-year-old data, researchers have found significantly elevated levels of argon, krypton and xenon in Jupiter's atmosphere that may force a rethinking of theories about how the planet, and possibly the entire solar system, formed. While lead researcher Tobias Owen does not put much stock in the idea that Jupiter might have migrated inward to its present position, other scientists on the team say the idea merits consideration. Owen expects the probes will find similarly high levels of noble gases in Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Hints of these gases have even been found in the thick atmosphere of Venus, another planet now begging more study.

Thank you Ronald Reagan even if you had nothing to do with this mission, you told the World that we could... and we have.

TT

PING! Check out the post impact analysis by the Electric Universe Theorists.

THANKS FOR THE PING.

I haven't read all the posts to see if anyone predicted this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050720/ap_on_sc/comet_buster

NASA Weighs Encore for Deep Impact Craft

By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer

Tue Jul 19, 9:46 PM ET

LOS ANGELES - NASA is considering an encore for its Deep Impact spacecraft, which made history earlier this month when it smashed a hole in a comet to study its frozen primordial core.

While the space agency has not approved a specific future mission, it gave scientists at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena the go-ahead to bring the spacecraft closer to Earth's orbit for a potential mission extension.

"We're trying to maintain as many options as we can," Andrew Dantzler, the director of NASA's solar system division, said Tuesday.

Deep Impact planned to fire its thrusters Wednesday to slightly change course in a maneuver that will bring it back to Earth by 2008.

The spacecraft then will switch to safe mode to conserve energy until it receives orders for a possible second mission. If left untouched, the spacecraft will drift farther away.

The original mission called for the mothership to release an 820-pound copper impactor into the path of the onrushing comet Tempel 1, record the collision from a distance and retire as space junk.

But the mothership remained surprisingly healthy despite being bombarded with debris during a close flyby of Tempel 1 minutes after the collision.

Members of the Deep Impact team hope the maneuver will allow the spacecraft to steer toward 85P/Boethin, a comet that was discovered in 1975 and orbits the sun every 11 years.

Since Deep Impact carried only one impactor, any future mission will not cause a cosmic smashup. Instead, scientists hope the scientific instruments aboard Deep Impact will allow them a detailed glimpse of yet another comet.

Mission principal investigator Michael A'Hearn said a possible extended project would cost about $32 million; the Deep Impact mission cost $333 million.

The July 4 collision 83 million miles from Earth gave off two flashes of bright light and carved a crater in the potato-shaped comet. A larger-than-expected debris cloud extended thousands of miles into space, and has prevented scientists from peering into the comet's interior.

The impactor vaporized as it crashed on the comet's sunlit side, but the mothership survived unharmed. It flew within 310 miles of Tempel 1 and took pictures of the comet as it flew away.

Comets are irregular bodies of ice and dust that orbit the sun and were born about 4.5 billion years ago — nearly the same time as the solar system itself. When a cloud of gas and dust condensed to form the sun and planets, comets formed from what was left over. Studying them could shed light on how the solar system formed.

Deep Impact blasted off in January from Florida for a 268-million-mile journey toward Tempel 1, which was discovered in 1867 and moves around the sun in an elliptical orbit between Mars and Jupiter every six or so years.

___

On the Net:

Deep Impact mission: http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact

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

Out is the long-held view of hardened, dirty snowballs hurtling through space. In is the comet as a fluffy ball of powder, blowing puffs of dust whenever sunlight falls on it.

Hahahaha... I think Mel Acheson and the Electric Universe people have hit a home run.

Now the astronomers propose a fluffy ball of powder... and exactly what mechanism do they postulate to "puff the dust," sunlight allergic Magic Dragons????

Maybe playing the song would help. ;')

Comet's course hints at mystery planet [ from 2001 ]
Govert Schilling | last updated February 5th, 2002 | Govert Schilling
Posted on 08/18/2006 5:36:59 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1686125/posts