--- title: Electric Comets — Tempel 1, Wild 2, and 67P --- If you want to judge the Electric Universe by its sharpest claim of predictive success, comets are the place to look. Here the theory made **specific, dated, published predictions** ahead of major space missions — and its proponents argue the missions delivered. This page tells that story in the proponents' terms, with the paper trail linked. ## Two pictures of a comet **The standard picture** descends from Fred Whipple's "dirty snowball": a comet is a primordial body of ices and dust; approaching the Sun, its ices sublimate, producing the coma and tails. Refinements since the spacecraft era (an "icy dirtball" with more rock than ice, sub-surface volatiles under an insulating crust) keep sublimation as the engine. **The electric picture**, developed chiefly by **Wal Thornhill** following Ralph Juergens, starts from the comet's orbit: a body spending most of its time far from the Sun acquires a strongly negative charge relative to the plasma environment near the Sun. Diving sunward across the Sun's electric field, it **discharges**: the coma is a glow-discharge sheath, the jets are **cathode arcs machining the surface**, the fine "dust" is electrically eroded rock, and the tail is part of the circuit. The model therefore expects comet nuclei to look like **dry, rocky, sharply sculpted bodies** — burnt, cratered, and carved — rather than melting snowbanks. ## Deep Impact, July 4, 2005: the predictions on the record NASA's Deep Impact mission fired a 370 kg copper projectile into **comet Tempel 1**. The day before impact, the Thunderbolts group published a list of expectations from the electric model — the page is still up, datestamped — including: - **a flash *****before***** physical contact** (an arc as the charged projectile closes with the charged nucleus), - **an impact more energetic than mechanical kinetics predicts**, and - **little evidence of water or ice in the excavated subsurface** — a dry, consolidated, rocky interior. What happened, in the proponents' telling: observers reported a **small flare before the main flash**; mission scientists described the blast as far brighter and more energetic than anticipated ("considerably more energetic than I expected," in one team member's words); and imaging showed a layered, consolidated, crater-marked surface. The Thunderbolts group published "Deep Impact — Confirming the Electric Comet" and has counted Tempel 1 as the theory's cleanest test ever since. The mission team's own headline conclusions differed: spectrometers detected **water ice and organics in the ejecta plume**, and the standard interpretation treats the pre-flash and energetics as consistent with impact physics into a porous surface. Both readings of the same event are linked below — this is exactly the kind of case the reader should adjudicate directly. ## The pattern proponents see across missions - **Stardust at Wild 2 (2004–2006):** the returned dust contained **high-temperature minerals** — crystalline silicates and refractory inclusions of the kind formed in intense heat — from a body supposed to have condensed in the cold outer system. The mission's own scientists called it "fire and ice"; electric theorists read it as machined rock, not primordial frost. - **Deep Space 1 at Borrelly (2001):** a hot, dry, dark surface — "no frozen water on the surface" in the team's reporting. - **Rosetta at 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (2014–2016):** a hard, dark, bone-dry sculpted surface that bounced the Philae lander; **strikingly little exposed surface ice**; jets erupting from cliffs and pits; unexpected findings like abundant molecular oxygen. Mainstream science places the ice safely below an insulating crust; electric theorists say the "snowball" has simply never been seen because it isn't there. The cumulative argument is not that any one mission is inexplicable conventionally — it is that the electric model **said in advance** what comets would look like up close (rock, sculpture, surprise energetics), while the standard model was repeatedly surprised. ## The electrochemistry of comets For the electric-comet model the score is kept by the predictions — and proponents add that even the water detected around a comet need not come from buried ice. In the electric reading, some of it is produced by **charge exchange and electrochemistry** as the comet's discharge reacts with the solar wind (a version of this argument was made in an arXiv paper on Deep Impact's "large-scale electrochemistry"). The comet missions are where the model was put to its most direct test. ## Related pages ## Sources & further reading - ["Predictions on Deep Impact"](https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050704predictions.htm) — the July 4, 2005 prediction page (TPOD) - ["Deep Impact — Confirming the Electric Comet"](https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/09/20/deep-impact-confirming-the-electric-comet/) — the proponents' retrospective - ["Comet Tempel 1's Electrifying Impact"](https://www.holoscience.com/wp/comet-tempel-1s-electrifying-impact/) — Thornhill's analysis - A'Hearn et al., "Deep Impact: Excavating Comet Tempel 1," *Science* 310 (2005) — the mission team's results - Wal Thornhill & David Talbott, *The Electric Universe* (2007), ch. on electric comets