Contact: James H. Wilson
July 8, 1994
The latest update from astronomers on the upcoming collision of a comet with the giant planet Jupiter will be available to Los Angeles area news media at a special briefing Monday, July 11, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
New animation video footage will also be available at the briefing, which begins at 11:30 a.m. in von Karman Auditorium at JPL, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena.
Main speaker will be Dr. Donald Yeomans, JPL astronomer and comet expert, whose team calculates the times and places that fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 will slam into Jupiter between July 16 and 22. Called the "string-of-pearls" comet, the celestial object is already torn apart and is speeding through space as a long trail of fragments that will hit the solar system's largest planet over a seven-day period.
Joining Yeomans at the briefing will be representatives of JPL's Galileo, Ulysses and Voyager spacecraft -- all of which will observe the comet collisions from their vantage points in space -- and a representative of the JPL-built camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which will also record the once-in-a- lifetime event.
For more information, journalists may call JPL's Public
Information Office at (818) 354-5011.
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