Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 brought the impact sites into view for terrestrial observers a few minutes after the collisions. Two other space probes made observations at the time of the impact: the "Ulysses" spacecraft, primarily designed for solar observations, was pointed towards Jupiter from its location away, and the distant "Voyager 2" probe, some from Jupiter and on its way out of the Solar System following its encounter with Neptune in 1989, was programmed to look for radio emission in the 1–390 kHz range and make observations with its ultraviolet spectrometer. The first impact occurred at 20:13 UTC on July 16, 1994, when fragment
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 thus a serendipitous discovery, but one that quickly overshadowed the results from their main observing program. Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was the ninth periodic comet (a comet whose orbital period is 200 years or less) discovered by the Shoemakers and Levy, hence its name. It was their eleventh comet discovery overall including their discovery of two non-periodic comets, which use a different nomenclature. The discovery was announced in IAU Circular 5725 on March 27, 1993. The discovery image gave the first hint that comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was an unusual comet, as it appeared to show multiple nuclei in an elongated region