Tempel 1

Tempel 1 is a Jupiter-family comet discovered by the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel in 1867, completing an orbit of the Sun about every 5.6 years. It became the target of NASA's Deep Impact mission, which in 2005 released an impactor that struck the comet at high speed so the resulting debris plume could be studied from the accompanying flyby spacecraft, and the comet was revisited by the Stardust spacecraft in February 2011. A close pass by Jupiter in May 2024 altered its orbit slightly, lifting its perihelion distance for its next return in 2028.