Newsletter Archive

Deep News Newsletter for the Deep Impact mission Issue 14

August 2004

---

LAUNCH: December 30, 2004
IMPACT ENCOUNTER: July 4, 2005

With less than half a year to launch, the Deep Impact mission continues testing of both the spacecraft hardware and software as they prepare for the transfer to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It's been a busy summer for the entire team at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp and the University of Maryland where the Principal Investigator and members of his international science team held meetings. Read more about this remarkable mission to put a deep crater in a comet and find its composition and clues to the beginning of the solar system at:
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov
http://deepimpact.umd.edu

Congratulations to MESSENGER
The Deep Impact team sends its best wishes to our sister Discovery mission, Messenger. With a successful launch on August 3, Messenger is on its way to Mercury to study that rocky planet.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/main/index.html.

Up Close and Personal - Meet our summer interns
The mission has been making a Deep Impact on the future of engineering and science as we hosted four summer interns - one at the University of Maryland and three at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Each student has been assigned to work some facet of the mission and as we close the summer, they share with us their excitement about space science and the Deep Impact mission. Meet Jessica, Cindy, Nick, and Julia.
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/community/bio-jchavez.cfm
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/community/bio-crich.cfm
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/community/bio-ntaylor.cfm
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/community/bio-jdemarines.cfm

Educators - New and Improved activities in math and science
Did you have a restful summer? We want to send you back to school with some new and some improved activities tied to national math and science standards. An update of our Designing Craters activity was done by McREL this summer giving it a new look and adding more references. It is still the inquiry-based activity that Gretchen Walker produced. And as if that weren't enough, our team at McREL also matched our Mission Challenges to national math standards, putting them in student and teacher's guide formats . Now, your students can use math to solve real challenges that our mission team encountered. They'll have so much fun, they won't know they're learning!
Designing Craters: http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/educ/DesigningCraters.cfm
Mission Challenges: http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/disczone/challenge.cfm

Where is Tempel 1? Have you checked it lately?
If you haven't checked to see where Comet Tempel 1 is lately, you may want to take a look and see how much closer it is to its impact destination in July 2005. Remember, our amateur astronomers will be looking up into the sky to see this comet again in late 2004 and early 2005.
http://deepimpact.umd.edu/amateur/where_is.shtml

A Model for Excellence! How was the Deep Impact model born?
Deep Impact has three paper models you can download and build - the impactor only, the basic model and the detailed model with 3-D instruments. How did these models come to be? It started with a paper model made by Bill Blume at Jet Propulsion Laboratory to demonstrate the spacecraft's movements in space to the rest of the team. But where it went from there is quite a story. Meet Denise Cook-Clampert and David Lewis from Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. and see how our current models were born.
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/disczone/excellence.cfm

Did you see our past Deep News Issues?
Visit http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/newsletter/archive.cfm to catch up on exciting past news from the Deep Impact mission.

The Deep Impact mission is a partnership among the University of Maryland (UMD), the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Ball Aerospace and Technology Corp (BATC). Deep Impact is a NASA Discovery mission, eighth in a series of low-cost, highly focused space science investigations. See http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov or our mirror site at http://deepimpact.umd.edu.

Newsletter Archive