Dust observations of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 at the time of the Deep Impact^*

¹ INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo E. Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy e-mail: tozzi@arcetri.astro.it
² Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Max-Planck-Str. 2, 37191 Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany
³ University of Maryland, Department of Astronomy, College Park, MD 20742, USA
⁴ Institute of Astronomy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Tsarigradsko chaussee 72, 1784 Sofia, Bulgaria
⁵ European Southern Observatory, Alonso de Cordova 3107, Vitacura, Santiago, Chile
⁶ Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, Northern Ireland
⁷ Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educacion, Av. J.P. Alessandri 774, Nunoa, Santiago, Chile
⁸ European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching, Germany
⁹ Commissariat Energie Atomique, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
¹⁰ Deutsche Luft- und Raumfahrt Agentur, Rutherfordstr. 2, 12489 Berlin-Adlershof, Germany
¹¹ Vrije Universitet Brussel Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Received: 5 April 2007
Accepted: 17 August 2007

Abstract

On 4 July 2005 at 05:52 UT, the impactor of NASA's Deep Impact (DI) mission crashed into comet 9P/Tempel 1 with a velocity of about 10 . The material ejected by the impact expanded into the normal coma, produced by ordinary cometary activity. The La Silla and Paranal sites of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile participated in the world-wide campaign to observe this event.