Deep Impact a success

So, the Deep Impact mission was a success last night. It was fairly suspensfull leading up to the impact; for about a minute or so the entire auditorium was silent, the projectors displaying images from the impactor as it approached, and shots of nervous rocket scientists from JPL headquarters. All of a sudden, the teleconference with JPL showed NASA team members jumping up and down, hugging like long-lost family, shaking hands, and so forth. The mood lightened on our end too: mostly laughter at the behavior of the rocket scientists. Now, down to the science. No, I'm not involved in any of the science myself, but I am very close to all the scientists, so I get better access than most. One of my bosses being the principal investigator and the Santa-Clause-looking guy here.

The theories leading up to the impact led us to believe that the ejecta cone would be somewhere from 10 degrees from the normal vector to 45 degrees from the normal. All the images streaming down sofar make the ejecta cone look like it's the full 90 degrees; there's no real cone structure. I haven't seen any data about the crater yet, and it's likely to still be forming as I write this. That comet has some weak gravity, so everything runs in slow motion. Everything has been running smothly on the UMD end; my website (password protected, unfortunately, so I can't show off) has been running smothly, allowing scientists from around the world to upload their findings and search through other peoples findings. All the servers are happy. It seems as though I could have gotten much more sleep this weekend with the end result being the same.

Anyway, I shifted my hours with a coworker so I'm working from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm instead of noon to 5:00 pm, so at least I'll have this afternoon off.