
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 17, 1994                   TAG: 9407170054
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BALTIMORE                                LENGTH: Short

COMET FRAGMENT PUMMELS JUPITER

The first fragment from comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter on schedule Saturday, raising a plume of heat and clouds and leaving the planet scarred with a black dot about half the size of Earth.

Observatories in Chile and Spain and the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope captured views of a fireball and rising plume of hot gas that experts estimated at 1,200 miles wide.

"It's brighter than Io [a moon of Jupiter]," exclaimed co-discoverer Eugene Shoemaker. "I mean, it's bright."

Shoemaker and his fellow discoverers - wife Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy - received early data by computer from observatories around the globe.

A Hubble Space Telescope image of Jupiter showed a dark spot, estimated at about half the diameter of the Earth in size, at the site where the comet fragment hit. The impact was hidden from Earth, but the site rotated into view within minutes. The Hubble also detected a plume rising above the horizon of Jupiter shortly after the impact.

"It produced a fireball like that which was predicted," said Hal Weaver of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "That means the energy was 200,000 megatons of TNT or more."

Weaver added jubilantly, "The comet was not a dud."

The first comet fragment is one of the smallest, and one later comet fragment may be 10 times bigger than fragment A, Weaver said.

"This was just a preview," he said. "There will be even bigger shows later in the week."

by CNB