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We flew by at speed of about 27-thousand miles per hour and the spacecraft was slightly below the comet
in the sun plane. Who would've thought that we actually get to see a comet close up like we just did.
And when we first saw this, our mouths just dropped, our whole team just dropped cause we could begin to see,
if you look very close to the nucleus, you can see things that are slowly moving but then as you go farther
away,they're really migrating. To me this whole thing looks like a snow globe that you just simply shake it
watching it fly. When we saw the images come down, even in real time and the raw data, and realized we had a
cloud of snow around the nucleus we were astounded. Those are not stars. Those are all chunks of ice.
We think the biggest ones are at least the size of a golf ball and possibly up to the size of a basketball.
They akin more to maybe a dandelion. So what that means is that the snowballs are not what we might have
thought to begin with. We're not seeing softballs or even ice cubes. What we're seeing are fluffy
aggregates of very small pieces of ice. While it’s true that water is where the ice is, in fact it's
everywhere particularly on the sunlit side of the image. To our great surprise there's a tremendous
enhancement of water vapor coming out of the waist of this body. We wouldn't expect this at all and so
what we're seeing is an indication that here the ice is still on the inside. It’s being heated up by
the sun and that drives the water off. We're still collecting data. We've collected about 32,000
images of the comet since Nov. 4th. We continue to look at it about every 2 minutes and acquire data,
returning over 3,000 images a day of data. By the time we're all finished with this science mission
around Thanksgiving is our last imaging session, we will have returned about a 120,000 images of the
comet and that represents about 22 gigabytes of data.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology