Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Cosmic Whack-a-Mole

By any standard, the great thumping whack delivered by the Deep Impact probe on Comet Tempel 1 has to be considered pretty cool. I haven't seen any video yet, but for full coverage of the mission, along with the "Top 10" still photos of the event, I suggest a side trip to http://www.space.com/deepimpact/. I can't add anything useful to what they've said there, other than to wave people into the auditorium.

The impact does put me in mind, though, of John Bandicut's (and Charlie's!) game of cosmic billiards in the first book of my Chaos Chronicles: Neptune Crossing. In that case, they were out to demolish an errant comet that threatened Earth—and using the same nifty alien technology that got them to the comet, convert the energy from the impact into a spatial translation that zipped our friends off to Shipworld, out at the edge of the galaxy. We're not to that point in our technology yet, alas. But maybe someone like the quarx Charlie will come along and help us out one of these days.

Go see that space.com coverage now.

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1 Comments:

At 1:59 AM, Blogger Jeffrey A. Carver said...

It is one of my hopes to get the SF writing course back up online sometime this summer. The SF Museum in Seattle had expressed interest, but that interest appears to be waning, so it looks like I need to fix up the html myself and put it on my own web site. It's just a question of finding the time.

Meanwhile, I have a very limited supply of the Studyworks CDs. (I hadn't known that Amazon was sold out; they were selling them at remainder prices for a long time.)

Email me about it, okay?

Jeff

 

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