Hubble Photos Jupiter Impact Site

July 27th, 2009

The Hubble telescope was in the middle of testing and calibration of its new instruments, installed by astronauts during a service mission in May. Hubble managers decided that the Jupiter impact event was rare enough and important enough to pause testing to get a look.

Jupiter was supposedly hit by a rogue object several days ago that resulted in a dark bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. The bruise is now thought to have been caused by a comet.

Astronomers have been covering the event extensively, but the Hubble telescope was important to take a look because “it’s the sharpest at visible wavelengths,” Hubble spokesman, Ray Villard told SPACE.com. Here is the image:

July 2009 Jupiter comet impact taken by Hubble

There is a short little mini-documentary posted here about searching for comets. Particularly the impact comet from an event from the 1990s. The shoemaker-levy 9 broke into 21 fragments and they watched as all of them collided with Jupiter. The event would have obviously been catastrophic for us on Earth.

Events such as these bring the search for these cosmic missiles back into public thought. Seeing the kind of impact that happened on Jupiter and thinking about it happening to us is indeed terrifying. Muc more so than making sure you get the right Honeywell Barcode Scanner . There are some pretty good discussions in those links I posted earlier. Some doomsday morons of course, but some interesting posts about the overall impact (pardon the pun) of this event.