NASA attack on comet lights up Star Wars fear

Leigh Dayton
December 04, 2004

NASA will soon fire its "first strike" against a deadly interstellar enemy - comets and asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

NASA´S Deep Impact spacecraft will be launched early next year to intercept and blast a hole in a distant comet.

The main point of the six-month journey to Comet Temple 1 is to look inside a comet for clues to the formation and evolution of the solar system.

But it is also a major manoeuvre against comets and asteroids, which, unlike Temple 1, are on a collision course with Earth.

"We need to know a lot more about our enemy," said Duncan Steel, a space scientist with the Ball Solutions Group in Canberra and vice-president of the Rome-based Spaceguard Foundation, a consortium searching the skies for threatening objects, and devising ways to protect the planet from them. "We don´t know if we need an elephant gun or a butterfly net to deal with them. We need to find these things out."

When the spacecraft reaches the comet on July 4 it will hurl a 372kg projectile toward its hard "nucleus" at 10km a second. As the copper-tipped "impactor" hits - with the equivalent of three tonnes of TNT - optical and infrared data will be sent to earth.