Deep Impact Follow-up

SOLSTICE planned and executed a series of observations of comet Tempel 1 on July 3. Unfortunately the impact was not bright enough to be detected by SOLSTICE. The impact crater on the comet was estimated to be the size of a house, and the cloud of ejecta was fairly modest. Some predictions had indicated that the crater would be the size of a football field, which might have produced a much larger ejecta cloud. As it turned out, the comet briefly brightened by about a factor of five, which is still well below the SOLSTICE detection threshold.

To read more, see the July 2005 newsletter.