Comet Dust Clouds Planetary Society Crater Contest (Deep Impact)

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Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 25, 2006
CONTACT:
Contact Susan Lendroth
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Comet Dust Clouds Planetary Society Crater Contest

3 Winners Randomly Selected from Large Pool of Entrants in
Planetary Society Contest

Pasadena, CA, - When NASA's Deep Impact mission slammed into comet
Tempel
1 in July 2005, The Planetary Society expected to make an immediate
announcement about the winners of its "Great Comet Crater Contest" to
guess the diameter of the crater created by the impact. However, one
learns to expect the unexpected with space exploration; six months
after
the impactor kicked up an opaque cloud of comet debris, team scientists
have learned a lot about Tempel 1 but can still only estimate the
crater's size as being somewhere between 100 and 250 meters in
diameter.

The Planetary Society has, therefore, selected at random three grand
prize winners from the 1,865 contest entrants who submitted a guess
within the estimated size range. The grand prize winners and their
respective crater estimates are Wojciech Karcz, Tarnowskie Gory, Poland
- 161 meters; Michael Ramo, Danielson, Connecticut - 153 meters; and
Tim
Thomas, Hayward, California - 141.4272 meters. Read
http://planetary.org/explore/topics/comet_crater/ additional
information on the contest.

Contest rules stipulated that all entrants who guessed within 10 meters
of the correct crater diameter would be entered into drawings for the
grand prize, with three winners to be selected at random from that
pool. Since the Deep Impact team announced a size range rather than a
single figure, the number of entrants who fell within those parameters
proved quite large.

"When we planned our experiment, we estimated how long it would take
for
the dust to fall back onto the comet, and multiplied that estimate by
4," said Lucy McFadden, Co-Investigator on Deep Impact. "We only had a
limited time to observe because this was all happening at relative
speeds of 22,000 miles per hour. To our surprise, the dust never
cleared!"

Because the dust never cleared, the team used a combination of
theoretical modeling and constraints provided by image processing to
estimate the crater size to be between 100 and 250 meters in diameter.

More than 7,000 people from nearly 100 countries entered the contest,
with the median guess of crater size being 90 meters. In addition to
the three grand prize winners, the Society randomly selected 150
runners-up representing 24 nations: Australia, Austria, Belgium,
Canada,
China, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India,
Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, South
Africa,
Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, USA, and Venezuela.

Each grand prize winner will receive a custom-made plaque from Ball
Aerospace & Technologies Corp (BATC), who built the Deep Impact
spacecraft. The plaque is made of the same kind of copper material
that
made up the heavy mass of the impactor, laser-engraved with the mission
logo. The grand prize winners will also each receive a complimentary
Planetary Society membership. The runner-up prizes will consist of a
certificate and a Deep Impact spacecraft paper model provided by BATC.

"Since the impact on July 4, more than 7,000 contest entrants around
the
world have been waiting for the dust to settle so that the science team
could estimate the size of the crater made by Deep Impact," said Emily
Lakdawalla, Science and Technology Coordinator for The Planetary
Society. "The very uncertainty of the final result has reminded all of
us that no matter how many questions a space mission answers, it always
raises more."

The Deep Impact mission was led by Principal Investigator Michael
A'Hearn at the University of Maryland. BATC, in association with the
University of Maryland and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
developed and built the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft, impactor
spacecraft, and science instruments, including three telescopes, two
cameras and a spectrometer for analyzing the interior of the comet.
Deep
Impact is the eighth mission in NASA's Discovery Program, and the first
mission to ever impact a comet nucleus in an effort to probe beneath
its
surface.

About the Planetary Society

Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, The Planetary Society has
inspired
millions of people to explore other worlds and seek other life. Today,
its international membership makes the non-governmental Planetary
Society the largest space interest group in the world. Carl Sagan,
Bruce
Murray and Louis Friedman founded The Planetary Society in 1980.