Deep Impact’s Mothership Looks for Aliens
“We’re on the hunt for planets down to the size of Earth, orbiting some of our closest neighboring stars,” said Drake Deming, deputy principal investigator of Deep Impact’s planet-hunting EPOXI mission, in a statement.
NASA’s Deep Impact mission was originally launched on January 12, 2005, carried by a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, under the supervision of the Kennedy Space Center. A NASA Discovery Mission that was the eighth in a NASA series of low-cost, highly focused space science investigations, its mission was to offer to the public, educational and scientific communities, an extensive outreach program. This partnership was in cooperation with other comet and asteroid missions, along with institutions.
Today, this recycled Deep Impact probe has recently begun a new mission, a mission meant to seek out alien worlds beyond our own solar system. This one remaining mothership which was originally part of the Deep Impact mission is presently aiming its largest telescope at five different stars, in order to catch a glimpse of the possibility of any planets they may have. On January 22, 2008, its largest telescope that had been trained for this mission was to be used to look for “dips” in the star’s light. This was to inform the NASA scientists of a tell-tale sign of a planet crossing in front of its stellar parent as seen from Earth. “We can analyze this light to discover what the atmospheres of these planets are like,” said Deming, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
It is well known that each of the five target stars on NASA’s list were supposed to host extrasolar planets which are the size of Jupiter or even larger, according to NASA researchers. The flyby spacecraft of Deep Impact carries two telescopic cameras–one is for high-resolution and the other is for medium-resolution. This will be used in addition to the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh), the spacecraft was en route to a swing-by of Comet Hartley 2 on October 11, 2010. This comet investigation, the Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI), is meant to map gas outbursts from the Comet Hartley 2 in its search for water ice on the planets.
But toward the end of December of 2007, Deep Impact was on its way to the comet Hartley 2, when it zipped past Earth. This was the first of three flybys that would use planet earth’s gravity in order to hurtle the spacecraft toward Hartley 2. The NASA engineers had already calibrated the required instruments that were aboard the spacecraft Deep Impact, using the moon as a target in advance of the coming flyby.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
