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The first images show a huge explosion on the comet, as the washing machine-sized impactor struck the surface at around 37 000 kilometres an hour. The impactor is tiny compared to the comet, and can be likened to a mosquito striking the windscreen of a car.
Don Yeomans, a Nasa mission scientist, was ecstatic: "We hit it just exactly where we wanted to. The impact was bigger than I expected, and bigger than most of us expected. We've got all the data we could possibly ask for."
The Deep Impact craft consisted of two parts: a washing machine-sized impactor, which took images as it hurtled towards Tempel-1; and a car-sized flyby craft, which used two cameras to take images of the crater and the comet as a whole.
The flyby craft will also collect samples of the material thrown out during the collision. Scientists hope the mission will tell us more about comets � the 'dirty snowballs' left over after the planets and moons formed in our Solar System.
Deep Impact will provide our first look inside a comet. Findings from the mission may reveal how our Solar System formed, and may help us decide whether life could have been transported to Earth on a comet.
The craft is around 134 million kilometres from Earth, so scientists had to wait around 7.5 minutes after the impact before they received confirmation that the mission had gone as planned. It will be days before all of Deep Impact's data is sent back to Earth, and scientists will spend several months interpreting it.
The latest images can be found on NASA's Deep Impact website.
More info: NASA: Deep Impact
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