DEEP IMPACT MOVIE

What could have been a nice, subtle moment, however, is ruined by the fact that Leoni's emotive abilities do not extend above well-trained eyebrows. We see only her face as the personal tragedy slowly sinks in. There's one scene in particular where Tea Leoni as an MSNBC reporter is reacting to the telephoned news of a family member's off-camera suicide. It's difficult to care about these people when director Mimi Leder never asks them to furnish anything other than cheap, manufactured sentimentality. But the bland script shows far more evidence of the schmaltz of writer Bruce Joel Rubin ('Ghost') than it does the hard-edged canniness of co-writer Michael Tolkin ('The Player' and 'The Rapture').ДЇor one thing, the human dramas are not all that dramatic В– much time is wasted on an uninvolving subplot involving the comet's teenage discoverer, Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood) and his efforts to save his white-bread girlfriend (Leelee Sobieski).

DEEP IMPACT MOVIE

In a refreshing change from the more obvious disaster-movie theatrics, the movie wisely focuses on the individual human dramas of ordinary people facing their demise. But somehow the scheme doesn't work as planned and now mankind must steel itself for an 'extinction level event' В– wonkspeak for the very thing that killed the dinosaurs. A joint U.S.-Russian team of hot-shot rocket jockeys, led by veteran mission commander Spurgeon Tanner (Duvall), is quickly assembled and sent up to plant six nuclear-warhead 'moles' in the surface, which will theoretically atomize the comet into a harmless shower of hailstones. The story itself seems torn from recent headlines: One dark day, President Beck (Freeman) announces that a speeding ball of dirty ice is on a collision course with the third rock from the sun (whoops, that's us!). For a suspense drama, 'Impact' is a slack, oddly enervated and mawkish soup of largely lethargic performances by such normally robust stars as Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman and Vanessa Redgrave. (That still leaves 'Armageddon,' scheduled to open July 1, whose asteroid the size of Texas could seriously one-up 'Impact's' merely Manhattan-sized comet.)Д«ut the comet is not the only smallish thing about this film. The year's first of two much-anticipated movies about space-rocks hurtling toward Earth, 'Deep Impact' is an underwhelming disappointment from executive producer Steven Spielberg. A feature about movies filmed in WashingtonД®lijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski try to get out of town in 'Deep Impact.' (DreamWorks)Д¬hildren under 13 should be accompanied by a parent.This paper highlights portions of the article Deep Impact: Excavating Comet Tempel 1 written by the Deep Impact science team and published in Science as well as on-line by Science Express, 09/08/05. The Impactor separated from the flyby spacecraft and autonomously positioned itself directly in front of the encroaching Tempel 1 comet for a spectacular hypervelocity impact. The two-part spacecraft launched together in Januand separated on July 3 rd, 24В hours before reaching its Tempel 1 target. These instruments included one high resolution visible imager, two identical medium-resolution visible imagers (one on the flyby and one on the Impactor) and one infrared spectrometer. The primary science data was returned to Earth in near real-time, and all data was returned to Earth within 24В hours of the encounter.ДЇor the NASA Discovery-class Deep Impact mission, a two-part Deep Impact spacecraft was constructed: the Impactor spacecraft and the impact characterization (flyby) spacecraft, and an associated suite of surveillance instruments.

Meanwhile, the Flyby spacecraft used its two instruments to image the impact and then continued to photograph the comet as it followed its orbital path around the Sun. As it closed in on Tempel 1, the Impactor's camera relayed close-up images of the comet's surface to the Flyby spacecraft for downlink to Earth. With closing speeds of 23,000 mph, the Impactor's active guidance system steered it to impact on a sunlit portion of the comet's surface. On July 4th, 2005, in celebration of our nation's birthday, NASA's Deep Impact Impactor spacecraft collided with comet Tempel1 at 10В km/sec вЂ“ marking the first hypervelocity impact of a celestial body by a human-made spacecraft.