Gigantic Collision on Planet Jupiter

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A Gigantic Collision on Planet Jupiter
	7.23.09 - The Hubble Space Telescope's launch in 1990 sped humanity to one of its greatest advances in that journey. Hubble is a telescope that orbits Earth. Its position above the atmosphere, which distorts and blocks the light that reaches our planet, gives it a view of the universe that typically far surpasses that of ground-based telescopes.
Hubble is one of NASA's most successful and long-lasting science missions. It has beamed hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth, shedding light on many of the great mysteries of astronomy. Now NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken the sharpest visible-light picture yet of atmospheric debris from an object that collided with Jupiter on July 19. A cosmic object hit the planet and left a scar which is the size of the Pacific Ocean. Jupiter is by far the largest of the planets. It is more than twice as massive as all other planets combined. Since it is very rare to be able to record such an event the scientists at NASA changed their maintenance plans for the "Hubble"-Teleskop. Just recently the telescope was refurbished and is due to for checkout and calibration. However given the current happenings on planet Jupiter the scientists decided to continue to observe Jupiter instead. "Because we believe this magnitude of impact is rare, we are very fortunate to see it with Hubble," said Amy Simon-Miller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The collision was first observed by the Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley. Apparently on July 19, 2009 it was when the asteroid or comet crashed onto the surface of the planet. An event like that has only been seen once before; 15 years ago when the collision of fragments from comet "Shoemaker-Levy 9" crashed onto planet Jupiter as well. Simon-Miller estimated the diameter of the impacting object was the size of several football fields. The force of the explosion on Jupiter was thousands of times more powerful than the suspected comet or asteroid that exploded over the Siberian Tunguska River Valley in June 1908. Back then according to estimates approximately 60 million trees were destroyed.

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Date: Tuesday, Mar 23rd, 2010 at 9:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time)

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