Nearly six years after an 800-pound copper bullet excavated a crater on a comet, a NASA spacecraft revisiting the site has seen evidence of the destruction in images snapped during a Valentine's Day flyby, scientists say.
Instead of a well-defined pit, the Stardust craft saw what looked like a crater rim that was filled in the middle - a sign that the plume of debris from the 2005 high-speed crash that created the crater shot up and fell back down.
"The crater was more subdued than I think some of us thought," said mission scientist Pete Schultz of Brown University. "It partially buried itself."
Text: AP
Image: NASA scientists take questions on the Stardust NexT mission at a news conference at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011. (Photographs copyright AP)
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