Cheers And Job Well Done From Europe On Deep Impact Mission Success

Leaders of the nation's richest and most powerful nations may be having some trouble getting along at the G8 Summit in Europe this week, but the same certainly can't be said about their space agencies.

ESA's Director of Science, Professor David Southwood, offered his congratulations Wednesday to NASA's Deep Impact team, on a successful mission to Comet 9P/Tempel-1.

The Deep Impact spacecraft has completed its first steps in exploring a comet's interior by creating a crater with an impactor spacecraft, allowing the mother spacecraft to look deep inside the comet during a fly-by immediately afterwards.

"The Deep Impact mission brought the world together in an excellent opportunity make a new step into the advancement of cometary science," said Prof. Southwood.

"The success of the Deep Impact mission will allowing us to use many space and ground observatories to look for the first time right inside a comet. As ESA, we are proud to be contributing to this campaign with some of our best sky-watchers -- our Rosetta comet-chaser spacecraft, the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, as well as Hubble Space Telescope ( which we share with NASA ) -- and with ESA's Optical Ground Station in the Canary Islands. The results are going to be a terrific help in planning Rosetta's comet landing a decade from now."

FMI: www.esa.int