On July 4th, NASA had a projectile that was planned to intersect with a comet in order to help them better understand what makes up a comet. The project website can be found here. At 1:52 a.m. Eastern time, July 4th 2005, the projectile hit the comet (Temple 1). Looking at the images, it looks like it was a pretty impressive impact, and because of the way things happen in space there was still a large plume of material coming off the comet some 50 minutes later. Really, all of this is amazing considering an 800 pound projectile made such a large bang on a comet the size of Rhode Island.

NASA has been having all sorts of problems and issues raised recently, but I think that they are still doing a really great job. For how difficult of a mission they are undertaking, they are usually succeeding with a relatively small amount of casualties. I look forward to finding out more about what NASA has learned from this experiment.

-Matt