433-433 BLUE ALERT: JUPITER

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From Sky News, National Museum of Science and Technology (Winter 1994): It sounds like a scenario lifted from the script of a science fiction movie, but a comet will smash into the planet Jupiter sometime in mid-July 1994. Not only that, the comet has a Canadian connection.

Our story goes back nearly two years, to July 8,1992, when an uncharted comet (a chunk of primordial solar-system ice about as wide as a medium-sized city) swept within 50,000 kilometres of the surface of the giant planet Jupiter. The sideswipe with Jupiter was a disaster for the comet because jupiter's enormous gravitation ripped it into at least 21 pieces. Astronomers on Earth knew nothing about the cosmic sideswipe of Jupiter. On the night of March 22,1993, American comet and asteroid hunters Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker, along with Canadian comet expert David Levy, were using a 46-cm photographic telescope on Palomar Mountain in California for their routine celestial patrols when they came upon something thev had never seen before.

In the months since the discovery, astronomers have calculated the path of Comet Shoemaker-Levy and traced it back to Jupiter and the July 1992 breakup. That, however, is only half the story. Examination of the comet's future trajectory reveals that it is in temporary orbit around Jupiter, the first time a comet has been observed in orbit around a planet.

The most amazing prediction is that some or all of the Shoemaker-Levy fragments will collide with Jupiter in July 1994.

Nothing like this has ever been seen before. If this sequence of events happened to Earth, the impact of comet fragments weighing millions of tonnes would be devastating.

Jupiter, however, is 318 times the Earth's mass and cloaked in an atmosphere thousands of kilometres deep. For such a colossal world, the impending collisions will be mere pinpricks, even though the largest might equal many million megatons of explosives when it reaches denser atmospheric layers and blasts apart. Astronomers suspect that, at most, the planet's atmosphere will be smeared by a diffuse white ammonia crystal haze emanating from the affected area.