Deep Impact Squiggles...... 'secret'

i've got to take a break from this work/meeting stuff. i'm on my last day here and i've spent most of it redo-ing figures for one of the papers...... it's been fun and interesting and all that crap, but a bit exhausting. anyways, here's a few pics i grabbed from the DI website cause i spent a lot of time looking at them over the last couple days.




so this is a shot of the comet, just before the impactor did its buisness. we hit where the big arrow points. they spent a lot of time speculating about the little flow-ish looking thing. that's a little wierd considering it has no craters on it and these things were thought to be very processed (ie smashing into other shit all the time....) new stuff coming on that in a few months.

so this one is the time sequence from the medium-res-imager camera onboard the flyby craft. we hit obliquely (inclined 30 degrees) so that the impactor dug in a ways from the first flash point and made a really cool ejecta curtain. we spent a lot of time listening to pete talk about his cratering experiments (including shooting eggs at hundreds of mph.... talk about fun) check out his vids on the DI site here


and then the temperature map. the interesting thing about this is that the hot part is directly under the sun. i know. you're thinking, why is this interesting. the sun's hot right? i was a little surprised that they cared about this so much. but, then a little thought comes in - it TAKES A WHILE to heat things up. there's this concept of 'thermal inertia' that's important. the hottest time of day isn't noon. its about 2 or 3pm on earth cause the air takes time to heat up. the comet was actually reaching it's highest temperatures a little bit BEFORE local noon. this is extremely weird if you consider it...... there are lots of things you can do with that.


and then i thought i'd throw in the obligitory 'what did dave see' shot. i saw a fuzzy blob get a little brighter and fuzzier. not too much else to say about that.


ok, enough geek stuff. i'm guessing that those who were curious about why somebody spent two grand to have me come here for three days are still hopelessly mystified.....


the obligitory shot of me doing something. i stole this one from jesse. he had it right. i went camping to yosemite and brought a camera, 6GB of memory sticks and my laptop. yes, it's a little overboard, i know, but really, how else is one supposed to timelapse and all that wonderful data-heavy, battery-sucking stuff?? i'll have timelapse up soon.... check out my site