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We are

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looking at a picture of the planet Jupiter
taken with the Hubble Space Telescope

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in 1994, at a time when the fragments
of shattered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

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were pummeling into the planet,
leaving huge black impact

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sites on the planet.

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A bunch of them going in kind of  like this.

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Prior to Shoemaker-Levy 9,

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We had never had the opportunity
to prepare

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to watch an interplanetary impact

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in our solar system.

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Isn’t that incredible? That’s amazing. That’s what we all say.

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Shoemaker-Levy 9

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was a comet
that was discovered by Gene and Carolyn

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Shoemaker and David Levy,

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Which is why it's called
Shoemaker-Levy 9.

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It was the ninth Comet
that team had found.

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And what was unusual about Shoemaker-Levy 9

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was that it was in orbit
around Jupiter.

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We believe was captured
probably about 70 years earlier,

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the late 1920s.

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It wasn't just flying
through the solar system.

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It had, at some point in the past,
been captured

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by the gravitational field of Jupiter.

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And more importantly than that,
when the orbit of the comet

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was computed,
it was discovered that within

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about six months
this comet was going to hit Jupiter.

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We think the reason
that Shoemaker-Levy 9 was shattered

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into so many fragments
was that on its last close pass

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while it was orbiting Jupiter,
the gravitation was so strong,

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the gravity field that it actually caused
it to fragment and break up.

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I was asked to take all

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of the proposals
that had been accepted to look at Jupiter

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as the comet was hitting it
and put them together into one large

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observing program, with Hubble
so that it could capture

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all the full range
of what may happen on Jupiter.

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Everybody who predicted
that we would see something

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dramatic was right.

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And the Hubble
observations were fantastic.

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We saw massive explosions, we saw ripples
in the atmosphere of Jupiter.

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We saw dark material that was processed

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by the intense heat of these explosions.

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This image of Jupiter, taken
by the Hubble Space Telescope,

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was one of the most dramatic images
from the Shoemaker-Levy 9 week.

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It was a week long event.

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It took that long for all the fragments
of this shattered comet to hit Jupiter.

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This particular image
is of a particularly large fragment.

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It created a massive plume of material

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that shot out for thousands of miles
above Jupiter's cloud tops.

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It took about 20 minutes to rise
and then collapsed.

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And so the arc that we see
in the bottom of this image

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is the collapsed material
from this gigantic plume.

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It was just an amazing

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example of the power of collisions
in our solar system.