"A jet-black, pickle-shaped, icy dirt ball traveling at 6.3 miles per second."

That was Tempel 1 -- 83 million miles away. And we hit it with an impactor launched from Deep Impact.

At those speeds, impactor had to be in the right place at the right time to intercept the speeding snowball.

"It's a bullet trying to hit a second bullet with the third bullet," Rick Grammier, Deep Impact project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in June.

And Deep Impact filmed the brilliant explosion and sent the pictures home.



Amazing! Spectacular! Beautiful!