The "Hans Heydrich" name will be going faster and farther than ever before!

I listed dad as one of the names to be engraved on the Deep Impact spacecraft. It is an interesting mission that launches in late 2004 and intercepts a comet in July 2005. The 800 lb copper impactor will smack the comet at 6 miles per second (19 GigaJoules of energy) and make a crater the size of a football stadium. Meanwhile the mother ship will watch and record the event from 300 miles to see what kind of stuff is inside the comet.

Listed below is the NASA homepage for this project which is very interesting but you have to dig around for the good stuff. It has some animations and some footage I saw a few years back showing test impacts at 6 miles per second into pumice dust. If you are reading this before Jan 31, 2004 you can get listed on the mission as well.

go to: http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov

Put your name on it, even if it misses the comet completely your name could really be going somewhere...