I stayed up late Sunday night to watch Deep Impact hit comet Tempel 1. It was a little disappointing. If you don't know (and no one else in the 14 person group I was with had heard of it), Deep Impact is a NASA mission that launched in January and was deliberately crashed into a comet to see what would happen. A day before impact the ship split into two, one part to crash, the other part to sit back a little and record what happened. Based on the impact, we hoped to discover clues as to the composition of the comet which are formed from debris from the early formation of the solar system.The impact was at 1:52AM Monday morning. I stayed up late to watch it. I couldn't find any mention of the upcoming impact on CNN or other news channels and the mission web site wasn't any help either (many of the links were broken). Then, at the time of impact, CNN switched to the JPL and showed the view from mission control. They showed a grainy black and white photo and a lot of reaction shots of scientists cheering. Easily could have waited till the morning. Still, it's pretty cool stuff.
There's also a stupid part to the story. Russian astrologer Marina Bai has sued NASA for $300 million, claiming Deep Impact "ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe," and caused her "moral sufferings".
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