During a week-long period of impacts by Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in mid-July the recently-repaired Hubble Space Telescope was busy surveying the damage from high above the Earth's atmostphere. Rob Landis (Space Telescope Institute) will be guest speaker at the August meeting of the Westminster Astronomical Society of Maryland. Dr. Landis will recap some of the highlights of the comet crash which some have called a "once-in-a-millinium event."The meeting on August 17 begins at 7:30 p.m. EDT in Room 111 of the Lewis Hall of Science, located on the Western Maryland College Campus, in Westminster. WMC is located on West Main Street (Md. 32), several blocks west of the intersection of Md. 27 and Md. 32.
Regular monthly meetings of the WAS are free of charge and are open to the public. An abstract of the talk is presented below for your information. Abstract Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (1993e) was discovered in March 1993. Early ground-based observations indicated the comet had fragmented into several pieces. The comet is in a highly inclined, elliptical orbit around Jupiter. P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 was tidally ripped apart during peri- Jove in July 1992. The Hubble Space Telescope has provided the most detailed look to date and resolved 20 separate nuclei. The nuclei are expected to slam into Jupiter over a five-day period beginning on 16 July 1994. The total energy of the collisions will be equivalent to 100 million megatons of TNT (more than 10,000 times the total destruc- tive power of the world's nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War). An armada of spacecraft will observe the event: Voyager 2, Galileo, IUE, Ulysses, and the Hubble Space Telescope. HST will be the astronomical instrument of choice to observe P/SL9, and the after effects of the energy imparted into the Jovian atmosphere. NASA Select television may provide planetarium patrons with a ringside seat of the unfolding drama at Jupiter. Robert Landis Contact the person listed below for more information. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Curt Roelle Curtis_Roelle@jhuapl.edu Space Department / Space Sciences Branch Johns Hopkins University -- Applied Physics Laboratory