A rocket carrying the Deep Impact spacecraft blasts off from Florida in January 2005.
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Image courtesy NASA.
Deep Impact Blasts Off
News story originally written on January 14, 2005
A rocket blasted off on January 12,
2005. The rocket was carrying a robot spacecraft called Deep
Impact. Deep Impact
will study a comet.
Deep Impact has two parts. One part will fly by the comet. The other part
is called an "impactor". The impactor will crash into the comet!
It will make a crater as big as a football stadium on the comet.
Scientists
want
to
see what the insides of a comet are like. The flyby part of Deep Impact will
take pictures before, during, and after the crash.
Deep Impact will get to Comet Temple 1 on
the Fourth of July, 2005. The comet is named after Ernst Tempel. He discovered
the comet in 1867. Comet Temple 1 goes around the Sun once every 5.5 years.
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