Campquake Senate

You can watch a live feed of deep impact crashing into the comet:
http://www.noao.edu/news/deep-impact/

You may have to try a few times in order to connect.

When exactly is it supposed to hit?

last night, 10:52 pacific I think.
There should be lots of images on the news sites by now.

What happened exactly, a comet was impacted by an asteroid? What distance from earth?

The comet was hit by a spacecraft launched by the USA, for
the purpose of stirring up dust in order to learn it's
composition. It hit at the speed of 23,000 mph, which
sounds fast, but is only the same speed as the rotation of
the earth.

The comet is about the same distance from us, as the Earth
is from the sun. That makes it about 8 light-minutes away.
Close on the scale of previous solar system explorations.
It is in the general direction of away from the sun, from
our perspective.

Of course the person who made this possible was Isaac Newton,
who discovered 400 years ago that you could chart the position
and velocity of a comet by making careful observations from
the Earth.

Kepler?

It was quite an amazing feat really. Like hitting a bullet with another bullet. Now I hear some "seer" wants to sue do to the astoriod being hit and mis-aligning the universe. She can no longer make predictions.

Buzzed wrote:It was quite an amazing feat really. Like hitting a bullet with another bullet. Now I hear some "seer" wants to sue do to the astoriod being hit and mis-aligning the universe. She can no longer make predictions.

LOL!!! Should have "seen" this coming though...

warf wrote:Kepler?

I would guess that Kepler's discoveries in optics, mathematics and
especially astronomy must have directly inspired Newton's work.
But Newton went far beyond Kepler. After all, predicting the paths of
comets was just a side effect of his theory of universal gravitation.