"You can not help but get a big flash when objects meet at 23,000 miles per hour," said Deep Impact co-investigator Dr. Pete Schultz of Brown University, Providence, R.I. "The heat produced by impact was at least several thousand degrees Kelvin and at that extreme temperature just about any material begins to glow. Essentially, we generated our own incandescent photo flash for less than a second."

"The final image was taken from a distance of about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) from the comet's surface," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland, College Park. "From that close distance we can resolve features on the surface that are less than 4 meters (about 13 feet) across. When I signed on for this mission I wanted to get a close-up look at a comet, but this is ridiculous… in a great way."

Although the mission might be deemed successful, it was closely monitored by the flight controller team. In the past 6 years, a number of space craft have been lost, whether to failed measurements in design, or errors in programming, so Deep Impact's final moments were under scrutiny. During its final hours, the impactor's first rocket firing showed that it would be moving away from the comet.

"It is fair to say we were monitoring the flight path of the impactor pretty closely," said Deep Impact navigator Shyam Bhaskaran of JPL. "Due to the flight software program, this initial maneuver moved us seven kilometers off course. This was not unexpected but at the same time not something we hoped to see. But then the second and third maneuvers put us right where we wanted to be."

Deep Impact was sent to study what lies beneath the surface of a comet - which is thought to be composed of material from the solar system's formation. By studying the picture and composition of the icy traveler, scientists hope to it would answer questions about how the solar system had formed, some 4-5 billion years ago.