NASA Celebrates Comet Strike

FILE - Undated file photo, issued by the British Crown Office of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan man found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing. al-Megrahi who was found guilty of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a PanAm flight over Scotland that killed 270 people, was released from a Scottish prison in 2009 on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with a fatal cancer. He was reported by his son to have died Sunday May 20 2012. (AP Photo/Crown Copyright)

It sounded like science fiction — NASA scientists used a space probe to chase down a speeding comet 83 million miles away and slammed it into the frozen ball of dirty ice and debris in a mission to learn how the solar system was formed.

The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse.

The impact at 10:52 p.m. PDT was cause for celebration not only to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but also for the more than 10,000 people camped out at Hawaii's Waikiki Beach to watch it on a giant movie screen.

"It's almost like one of those science fiction movies," said Steve Lin, a Honolulu physician.

"This was an amazingly difficult technological challenge to pull off," said CBS News Space Consultant Bill Harwood on CBS News' The Early Show. "It hit at 23,000 mile an hour."

The cosmic smash-up did not significantly alter the comet's orbit around the sun and NASA said the experiment does not pose any danger to Earth — unlike the scary comet headed for Earth in the 1998 movie, "Deep Impact."

Scientists at mission control erupted in applause and exchanged hugs as a voice on a speaker proclaimed, "Team, we got a confirmation."

It was a milestone for the U.S. space agency, because no other space mission has flown this close to a comet. In 2004, NASA's Stardust craft flew within 147 miles of Comet Wild 2 en route back to Earth carrying interstellar dust samples.

"A lot of people said we couldn't do this or wouldn't be able to pull it off," said Rick Grammier, the mission's project manager. "It happened like clockwork and I think that's something to be proud of on America's birthday."

Rough images by the mothership that released the probe on its suicide mission 24 hours earlier showed a bright white flash from the comet upon impact, which hurled a cloud of debris into space. When the dust settles, scientists hope to peek inside the comet's frozen core — a composite of ice and rock left over from the early solar system.

In Darmstadt, Germany, David Southwood of the European Space Agency congratulated NASA and controllers erupted into applause upon impact. "The Deep Impact mission brought the world together in an excellent opportunity to make a new step into the advancement of cometary science," he said.

The European agency was observing and photographing the comet collision with its Rosetta spacecraft, which will attempt to rendezvous with a comet in 2014.