What a fun month this has been!

Deep Throat revealed, and now Deep Impact. At about one a.m. CDT today NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully released its impactor into the path of the pickle-shaped comet Tempel 1. That was just about the time the tiles on the wall surrounding the upstairs bathtub fell off. When I did the major clean of the bathroom Friday, I noticed that the tiles were pulling away from the wall, so it was probably all damp behind them. Swell. That tile wall has been a source of periodic headaches starting when the ceramic soap/washcloth holder fell off three summers ago.

I would like to hurl an 820 lb. washing machine at the tile wall, but it probably wouldn't tell us much about the origin of the solar system. According to NASA's website, the Deep Impact spacecraft is about the size of a VW Beetle. The impactor has been described as the size of a washing machine, or a coffee table. With an impact velocity of 23,000 m.p.h., it could take out a lot of bathroom tile. Scientists expect the crater caused by the impact will be the size of a football field.



In case you think this is the work of Bill Watterson's "Spaceman Spiff", there's really a lot of valuable information to be gained by this mission. David Grinspoon, planetary scientist and author of "Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life," has written a helpful op-ed in today's New York Times:

We stand to learn a lot about impact cratering - one of the major forces that has shaped all the worlds of our solar system. We will also have the chance to peer into the newly formed crater and observe the ice and vapor blasted back into space, thereby learning what lies within this frigid little world. .. Deep Impact will simply make one more small hole in an object that, like all planets large and small, has been repeatedly dinged by colliding space debris since our solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago. ..It is those dusky beginnings that this experiment can illuminate. Beneath the dirty ice crust of a comet like Tempel 1 is material that has been in deep freeze since the birth of our solar system. Mixed into this timeless frozen treat are organic molecules like those that seeded the young Earth with raw materials for making life. This ice may hold some buried chapters of the story of our origin.

And maybe, just maybe, scientists will discover a material to keep the tiles stuck on the bathroom wall. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Tonight, just as fireworks displays are in full bloom in Dallas, the VW Beetle will be at its closest approach to the pickle.

http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/press/050703jpl.html