Re: Crash exposes comet's inner secrets



G=EMC^2 Glazier wrote:
> Hi Sam NASA should have chipped a piece of the comet and returned it to
> Earth. Smashing cameras,and all that goes with them into comets and
> asteroids only puts man made garbage into the solar system. Just think
> of all the man made junk circling the Earth. With the tiny brain of NASA
> they might be analyzing their own debris. It is just another of their
> Rube Goldberg engineering ways.

There is undoubtedly some contamination of the data by the impactor
spacecraft itself. But at what relative concentration? The impactor was
predominantly a slug of copper. This was chosen because existing data
on comets suggests heavily that they are poor in copper. Upon impact
with the comet, the energy raised the ejecta temperature to
incandescence, which the fly-by spacecraft's spectrometer could then
analyse for chemical signatures. The copper in the impactor can be
confidently subtracted from the spectrum. The other stuff on the
impactor is hardly worth fretting over, given the huge mass of the
ejecta. The signal/noise ratio is too large.

-Mark Martin

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