The word 'impactor' is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used as a noun to refer to something or someone that causes impact or has the potential to cause impact. Example: The asteroid was classified as an impactor, capable of creating a massive crater upon collision with the Earth.
One would be to use a "kinetic impactor", astronomer-speak for ramming the rock with something heavy to knock it off course.
The day beforehand it should have released a copper "impactor" weighing 370kg (820lb) that will punch a crater in Tempel-1's surface.
One is to use a "kinetic impactor"—in effect employing a heavy, fast-moving spacecraft as the cue ball in a game of interplanetary billiards.
The impactor produced the highest-resolution pictures of a nucleus surface ever, imaging details less than 10 metres (33 feet) in size.
To pass, the system must prevent the impactor from traveling more than a limited distance beyond the plane of the window — a stipulation that might necessitate tethers attached to the car to keep the air bags in place.
"According to the prevailing model prediction, approximately half of the Moon-forming material should come from the Mars-size impactor," said Junjun Zhang, an isotope geochemist at the University of Chicago and the study's first author.
It's been one asteroid-impactor of a year, and most of us can't wait for 2016 to go extinct.
Because of this, Cantu said, the linear-impactor tests are replicating the most spectacular of collisions, rather than the lower forces known to cause the majority of concussions, such as hits along the line of scrimmage.
"We would very much like to see a linear-impactor type test to supplement the Nocsae test that's used right now," he said.
One was that the successful NIH grant proposals of the high-impact primary authors who were study-section members were much more similar (measured by such things as the frequency of key words in them) to those of other successful proposals than were those of non-member high impactors.
For larger or closer NEOs, or those requiring a greater degree of deflection, you'd use "kinetic impactors," spacecraft loaded with lead or copper, to ram the target — speeding nails aimed at a speeding hammer.
