Mission Update - September 2004
Lucy McFadden, Deep Impact science team Co-Investigator, sums up her view of the Deep Impact mission this month.
There is a great deal of activity on the Deep Impact project these days and the project team is hard at work to track it all. A series of shipping readiness reviews are being held at Ball Aerospace in preparation for shipping the spacecraft to the Cape next month. The science team submitted papers to Space Science Reviews with their summary of the mission, primary engineering aspects of the mission, current knowledge of Tempel 1, and expectations for the outcome of the experiments defining the mission. Proposals for ground based telescopes that will observe the Deep Impact encounter in July 2005 are also due soon and the science team is furiously collaborating with colleagues to prepare for ground-based observing of Tempel 1 which will place our spacecraft data in perspective.
Final software and alignment tests on the instruments are being carried out. Plans for an educator workshop at launch and final science team meetings are forming and we are all looking forward to the spacecraft being shipped to the Cape in October.
