Developments in Brief : Artificial Comet Is Detonated Over East
A small artificial comet was exploded 180 miles over the Virginia coast earlier this month in an experiment designed to simulate what happens when real comet debris strikes Earth’s atmosphere.
A canister of 300 pounds of water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and particulate matter--the stuff comets are made of--was exploded three minutes after it was launched in a two-stage sounding rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia.
“The experiment was quite successful,” said Dempsey Bruton, NASA project engineer. “Of course they won’t know the results until later, when they get the data from the satellites.” The exploding cloud of comet material was monitored by two U.S. satellites and by tracking equipment in Virginia.
Michael Mendillo, a Boston University researcher who is directing the experiment, said he hopes to test a theory that the Earth’s atmosphere is constantly bombarded with debris from comets far off in space.
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