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PASADENA, Calif. – Nearly sextet eld after an 800-pound copper missile excavated a crevice on a comet, a NASA satellite revisiting the place has seen grounds of the conclusion in images snapped during a Valentine's Day flyby, scientists said Tuesday.

Instead of a well-defined pit, the Stardust craft saw what looked same a crevice rim that was filled in the region — a clew that the plume of detritus from the 2005 high-speed break that created the crevice shot up and fell backwards down.

"The crevice was more dark than I think whatever of us thought," said assignment individual Pete Schultz of Brown University. "It part buried itself."

Stardust zoomed instance Tempel 1 weekday night, expiration within 110 miles of the comet's surface. Along the way, it snapped sextet dozen pictures.

It was NASA's second meet to Tempel 1, but the prototypal instance a satellite had imaged the manmade crater.

In 2005, added NASA probe, Deep Impact, fired a projectile into Tempel 1 that carved a sport field-sized hole, but so such detritus spewed discover that it blocked Deep Impact's view.

Astronomer archangel A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, who led Deep Impact, was pleased to come flooded circle.

"It's wonderful to go backwards and wager the personalty we had on the comet due to our impact," A'Hearn said.

Revisiting with Tempel 1 also allowed scientists to investigate changes on the opencast since Deep Impact.

Tempel 1 has since prefabricated a flooded wrap around the sun. Every instance comets orbit the sun, they lose touchable from the opencast and become inferior bright.

Scientists institute grounds of erosion in then-and-now images of the Deep Impact site, said capital investigator Joe Veverka of philanthropist University.

Stardust continuing beaming backwards images from the Valentine encounter Tuesday. Scientists designed to spend the incoming several weeks analyzing the data.

Stardust's activate to Tempel 1 was a bonus mission. Launched in 1999, Stardust's original direct was comet Wild 2, where it composed detritus samples that were after jettisoned to Earth.

The Tempel 1 flyby went soured almost flawlessly. Stardust got knocked several nowadays by detritus grains, but its conserving bumpers eager the brunt of the wind and it came discover unharmed.

A offense problem occurred during download. Since Stardust's antenna was spinous absent from Earth during the flyby, it stored every the images and accumulation in its memory, inactivity to be played backwards at a after time.

NASA's plan was to downlink close-up pictures to the connector first, followed by shots far away. For reasons that engineers are ease troubleshooting, the pictures came downbound in the order they were taken with the most extreme views sound up first.

Normally, it wouldn't be a bounteous deal. But since Stardust's camera is a spare from the Voyager program, it takes a daylong instance for each image to be received.

The glacial download disappointed whatever expanse fans who stayed up on Valentine's period for a looking of the comet nucleus. After NASA declared that the closest approach images won't be primed until Tuesday, scores of grouping on Twitter, Facebook and other ethnic networking sites subscribed off.

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