The announcement was made at a press briefing at NASA headquarters in Washington, during which the Deep Impact team discussed the special fireworks show the mission will is expected to produce on July 4th.
The spacecraft was launched in early January aboard a Delta II rocket, and is scheduled to rendezvous with Comet Tempel 1 early next month. Twenty-four hours before contact, the spacecraft’s two main parts—Flyby and Impactor—will separate and take part in a very carefully orchestrated hit-and-run.
However in March it was discovered that the Flyby spacecraft's High Resolution Instrument (HRI) was not focusing properly. The team will use a process, called deconvolution, to remedy the situation. Deconvolution is widely used in image processing and involves the reversal of the distortion created by the faulty lens of a camera or other optical devices, like a telescope or microscope.
"The process is a purely mathematical manipulation that works extremely well,” said Don Yoemans, a co-investigator for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is managing the mission for NASA.
Discovery
Comet 9P/Tempel 1 was discovered on April 3, 1867 by Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel of Marseilles France while visually searching for comets. The comet was then 9th magnitude and described by Tempel as having an apparent diameter of 4 to 5 arcmin across. Later calculations revealed that the comet had been situated 0.71 AU from the Earth and 1.64 AU from the sun at that time.
http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/science/tempel1.html
