Quote:
Originally posted by VanderL@Jul 15 2005, 11:23 AM
Comet Tempel 1 may thus be back to sleep but work only starts for the astronomers
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I think this line is telling. Granted it is only a science journalist writing a summary, but the implication is NOT that we are done and nothing happened, but rather that the comet is mostly back to normal, and that the scientists have A LOT of work ahead of them to understand the results from this new dataset.
I will grant you that they will not explore many far-out alternative explanations for the observations. I expect most studies to assume that the comet was formed 4.6 billion years ago of material in the disk about the distance that Saturn is now, and that this object has been through the inner Solar System losing its volatile materials for millions of years.
It does sound like the initial story-line here is that Deep Impact slammed into a layer of dust so thick that the rest of the comet was unperturbed. Concerning the new jets observed in the NOT and WHT images from the Canary Islands, I'd like to see more about them. They seem not to be active now, ten days later. I wonder if they were artifacts of the impact spray only. Again, I'd like to know more about them.