NASA ATTACK ON COMET LIGHTS UP STAR WARS FEAR

by Kaspel, Sunday, December 05, 2004, 22:33

NASA will soon fire its "first strike" against a deadly interstellar enemy - comets and asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

NASA'S Deep Impact spacecraft will be launched early next year to intercept and blast a hole in a distant comet.

The main point of the six-month journey to Comet Temple 1 is to look inside a comet for clues to the formation and evolution of the solar system.

But it is also a major manoeuvre against comets and asteroids, which, unlike Temple 1, are on a collision course with Earth.

"We need to know a lot more about our enemy," said Duncan Steel, a space scientist with the Ball Solutions Group in Canberra and vice-president of the Rome-based Spaceguard Foundation, a consortium searching the skies for threatening objects, and devising ways to protect the planet from them. "We don't know if we need an elephant gun or a butterfly net to deal with them. We need to find these things out."