Deep Impact – A Review of the World's Pioneering Hypervelocity Impact Mission

Abstract

On July 4th, 2005, in celebration of our nation's birthday, NASA's Deep Impact Impactor spacecraft collided with comet Tempel1 at 10km/sec -marking the first hypervelocity impact of a celestial body by a human-made spacecraft. With closing speeds of 23,000 mph, the Impactor's active guidance system steered it to impact on a sunlit portion of the comet's surface. As it closed in on Tempel 1, the Impactor's camera relayed close-up images of the comet's surface to the Flyby spacecraft for downlink to Earth. Meanwhile, the Flyby spacecraft used its two instruments to image the impact and then continued to photograph the comet as it followed its orbital path around the Sun. The primary science data was returned to Earth in near real-time, and all data was returned to Earth within 24 hours of the encounter.For the NASA Discovery-class Deep Impact mission, a two-part Deep Impact spacecraft was constructed: the Impactor spacecraft and the impact characterization (flyby) spacecraft, and an associated suite of surveillance instruments. These instruments included one high resolution visible imager, two identical medium-resolution visible imagers (one on the flyby and one on the Impactor) and one infrared spectrometer. The two-part spacecraft launched together in January 12, 2005 and separated on July 3 rd , 24 hours before reaching its Tempel 1 target. The Impactor separated from the flyby spacecraft and autonomously positioned itself directly in front of the encroaching Tempel 1 comet for a spectacular hypervelocity impact.

Exploring the Bimodal Solar System via Sample Return from the Main Asteroid Belt: The Case for Revisiting Ceres

“…Deep Impact's impactor was ∼360 kg in mass at impact. The impactor's payload included a copper "cratering mass," an Impactor Targeting Sensor (ITS), thrusters, a highprecision star tracker, and a radio receiver (Henderson and Blume 2015). Impactors proposed for main-belt asteroid sample-return missions are much smaller with masses of 10 kg or less (e.g., Morimoto et al 2004).…”

Iterative Lambert’s Trajectory Optimization for Extrasolar Bodies Interception

“…While the first two objectives listed above can be partially fulfilled by observations in the vicinity of the ISO's surface, the extraction of material from inside the body would allow a more precise reconstruction of its origins, as well as being strictly necessary for the detection of prebiotic material. They therefore propose the inclusion of a collision phase using an impactor in the mission, capable of excavating material from the innermost layers of the object, something that has already been done for the Solar System's comet Tempel1 with the Deep Impact mission [11] and for the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with the spacecraft Rosetta and Philae [12]. Other celestial bodies such as C/2016 U1 (NEOWISE) [13] are also objects of possible studies.…”