Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

St Valentine’s Day, Monday, February 14th.  The sun will rise at 7:44.  It’ll be up for 10 hours and 24 minutes, setting at 6:09.   The moon, 3 days past first quarter, will set at 5:41 tomorrow morning.

About 11:40 this evening the Stardust spacecraft will pass about 120 miles from comet Tempel 1’s nucleus.  It’s happening over 200 million miles away, near Mars’ distance from the sun.  The spacecraft will take 72 pictures as it speeds past the comet at over 24,000 miles an hour.  By tomorrow morning many of the photographs should be available on the Internet and TV.  On Tempel 1’s last approach to Mars’ orbit it was struck bu a big chunk of copper when the Deep Impact spacecraft’s impactor struck the comet’s nucleus.  That was July 4th, 2005.  This time the Stardust-NExT mission is interested in changes in the comet that have occurred over the orbit, and it’s looking for the crater left by Deep Impact.

* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.