Mission Update - October 2005

Many members of the science team attended the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences in early September. A special session and a press conference were held at this meeting. The first published paper on the mission's results came out in ScienceExpress, the online arm of Science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The paper is technical and is available through institutions with a subscription, these are usually universities and colleges.

We continue presenting the first published science results here, available to everyone, through an article by Ray Brown.

Also, Picture This features the thermal map of Tempel 1's nucleus derived from the infrared spectrometer and was included in the Science paper.

The process of archiving data is proceeding and is on schedule.

After impact, when we had all of our data in hand, Ken Klaasen began the process of checking all of the calibration numbers. Some numbers were estimates before we had real data. With the data in hand, Ken could calculate the best and absolute calibration numbers. We are reviewing the calibration and adding all the telemetry data that came in after the impact. These are added to our data files, so that we can use the numbers in our analysis.

We have received inquiries about the crater, and we are still analyzing the images and discussing what we see. We will have that analysis completed in November, and then the Planetary Society can proceed with closing out their contest and announcing a winner.

Thanks for your patience on this matter. We didn't expect the success of one part of the mission (bright dust cloud) to affect a second part (seeing the resultant crater). But that is part of the fun of science, to meet with the unexpected.

--Lucy McFadden

Mission Update Archive