Deep Impact of words, asteroids, and my dad

Or, taking a NASA mission personally

I have to admit, when The Deep Impact Mission² ran an impactor probe into a comet on July 4^, 2005,³ I was personally upset. Ramming something into a heavenly body at 23,000 mph in order to see what it’s made of well seems a bit, I don’t know, disrespectful. But blowing things up seems to make folks happy, and the July 4th date had been planned for years. NASA definitely nailed that patriotic blowing stuff up thing, and I guess most folks were happy. I just kind of felt disturbed, but that’s because of my love of the stars. It goes deep.⁴

The Deep Impact probe carried a payload of 625,000 names of folks who signed up for the privilege to get their names jammed way into the center of the comet. I believe they found the comet was 75% empty space inside, and now also includes pulverized debris from a compact disc of names of hundreds of thousands of earthlings perhaps feeling remarkable. NASA scientists learned tons more from the particles emitted from the explosion, the light waves, etc.. But what is also interesting to me is that they carried on an additional mission after⁵ that one … because they could, and apparently, there is always more to see and do in space.

Astrological belt of interest

Deep Impact may have knocked me about because the astrologer in me had learned to appreciate the asteroids in terms of their mythic meanings too: the big ones between Mars and Jupiter anyway. Comets are not the same as asteroids, yet they have carried even more meaning for societies and meta-physicians for as long as we’ve been looking at them. I personally feel like astronomical bodies are like elders that are wiser than us. Those who departed for the skies, or those maybe came from them. So in astrology, the planets, stars and asteroids appear to mirror aspects of ourselves, individually and collectively, when we bother to look. Mythology does a similar thing for us, but that’s another word weaving across the web for another time.

As above, so below

~ The Emerald Tablet⁷

Impressive or impactful words and a gentle approach

So, now that that is out of the way, I’ll share another personally odd reaction I have to a common complement-word that’s a family favorite: impressive. This may be because I grew up with this being one of very few connecting points I had with my dad, and one of his favorite words. I thought, “who wants to impress anything on others, wouldn’t that leave a dent?”

Impact obviously felt a little bit like a ‘dust up’ on my psyche too, but I think I’m getting over it.

My dad and my mom split up when I was five, but my Dad and I definitely maintained some kind of relationship. It was very achievement-centric, circling around bullet point reports of grades, awards, and national politics. He knew very little about me otherwise, I thought, but who knows – dads tend to know things. My dad loves telling the story of how he once sat next to an astronaut-scientist-crystolographer at a dinner. Larry DeLucas⁸, who was apparently also, super handsome and gave some tips about how to fare in space comfortably – more on that below⁹.

Now as I get older, with my Dad living in a veterans center far from me, I realize he impressed on me a sense to contribute. That is, to contribute to one’s field, not just one’s job. He clearly did ¹⁰, and I try to as well in my chosen profession in the digital marketing landscape, as an art.

Thinking more about Deep Impact, impressions, and another word on my mind, I think I’ll write about Approach another time. After all, Impacts and Impression mean two bodies colliding in some kind of way, so maybe approach is critical for a successful mission? I have a draft post called “Terms of Endearment” or TOE coming soon, featuring my favorite – or most intriguing-to-me-these days words.

For now, you can busy yourself with this website’s glossary if you like a turn of phrase.

Thank you for reading. Thank you even more for looking at the stars. – Elizabeth

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1. Nicely done 404! NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory page, via Nasa Website. ↩︎
2. You can see a quick snap of the mission here. A photo of the impact on Comet 9P/Tempel. And a longer recap of Deep Impact on the NASA website proper here. . ↩︎
3. Yup, dangling preposition there, after all this is a casual post rushed out with my morning coffee. ↩︎
4. Just to set the record straight, I love NASA, and all things space travel and astronomy. At at 11 years old, I told my mom I wanted to be an astrophysicist with a second degree in linguistics. This was so I could be the first expert called in to study symbols in future alien spacecraft. Who wouldn’t want to be that person? Seven years later I majored in Fine Arts instead: a natural fit. But I have always loved me some space and quality Sci-fi too. ↩︎
5. And this is the supplemental-approved mission EPOXI here https://science.nasa.gov/mission/deep-impact-epoxi/ ↩︎
6. Demeter and Persephone are an interesting duo. ↩︎
7. A Wikipedia page on this paraphrased passage ↩︎
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_J._DeLucas ↩︎
9. SPACE TIPS: Larry told my dad, that he liked hanging out in the dirty laundry room in the shuttle “it was his favorite place” because it prevents you from getting bruised when you are bumping around. He said you could close your eyes and rest there. He also was so engrossed in his experiments with crystals that he didn’t do all his exercises and that when he was returning and went to press the shutter on the camera, he had no strength to do so. ↩︎
10. My dad’s work within the field of optometry is free to explore here. ↩︎