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For thousands of years comets have been a mystery to a man. They travel across the
sky very fast and have a bright 'tail' of burning gas. The comet Tempel 1 has an orbit far
outside the orbit of the furthest planet in our solar system, Pluto. It has been there for 4.6
billion years, 133 million kilometres from Earth. Last week a little American spacecraft
crashed into Tempel 1 The spacecraft had a camera and it took a photograph of the comet
every minute before it finally crashed into its surface.
The space mission to Tempel 1 cost $335 million and was called Deep Impact. The
spacecraft was travelling at 37,000 kilometres per hour when it hit the comet and the crash
completely destroyed the spacecraft. But before it hit the comet, the spacecraft took some
amazing photographs. The last one was a close-up picture which the spacecraft took just 3
seconds before it crashed into the comet.
"Right now we have lost one spacecraft," said a delighted NASA engineer. Deep
Impact was like an American Independence Day fireworks display. It took many years to
plan and ended in an enormous explosion.
Comets like Halley's Comet which visit the Earth frequently are not so interesting for
scientists. But comets like Tempel are so distant that they could hold the secrets of the
planets, the Earth's oceans and even of the original organic chemistry from which life
developed. "If you are thinking of comets as possible sources of organic material, then you
are looking for the organic elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen," said John
Zarnecki of the Open University.
Taken from "NASA Gladly Loses a Spacecraft" by Tim Radford, The Guardian
Weekly, 2005