Preparations Begin

Abstract

“We’re going to see an impact!” Gene Shoemaker said on May 22, 1993, when Marsden published his epochal announcement. Scientists were thunderstruck, and within a few days three groups of scientists were getting involved. Comet people, already excited about viewing a disjointed comet so soon after breakup, relished the chance to learn a lot about how comets behave during those critical moments when they encounter a planet. Jupiter experts saw Shoemaker-Levy 9 as their golden key to unlocking some long-guarded secrets of that planet’s interior. And impact physicists, never having seen an explosion anywhere close to what the speeding fragments of S-L 9 could provide, looked forward to studying in complete safety, without risking humanity’s destruction, the releases of energy hundreds or thousands of times stronger than all the world’s nuclear arsenal put together.

Astronomers will organize to coordinate studies of the probable demise of what already is surely the most interesting comet ever discovered.¹

—Clark Chapman, June 1993