In this corner, weighing in at more than 318 times the Earth's mass, the heavyweight champion of the solar system, it's Jupiter.

And in the other corner, the challenger from the outer reaches of the solar system, traveling at 133,920 mph, it's The Comet.

The clash of the titans will take place this summer, beginning on July 16 and lasting more than five days. The comet, known to astronomers as Periodic Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, will collide into the far side of the gas giant Jupiter.

"There's been already a tremendous amount of interest by the astronomical community in this event," said Hal Weaver, associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

"Just about every major telescope in the world is going to be trained on Jupiter during the time of the impact," he said.

Although Penn State scientists will not directly take part in researching the comet, James Kasting, associate professor of geosciences, said they will be interested in information about Jupiter's atmosphere.

He related the impending collision to a similar event that happened on Earth about 65 million years ago.

"It'll be like the big impact that killed the dinosaurs," Kasting said.

This is the first time in history people will be able to observe an event of such magnitude. Never before have astronomers witnessed an object as large as Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding with a planetary atmosphere.

"And we know from the crater record throughout the solar system, as well as what has happened on the Earth, that these are very important events in the histories of the planets," Weaver said.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 has probably been in an eccentric orbit around Jupiter for about a decade, he said. During its last close encounter with the gas giant last July, the comet was torn into more than 21 fragments by Jupiter's tremendous gravity.

The comet is named after the three people who discovered it last year. Carolyn Shoemaker, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University, her husband, Eugene Shoemaker, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., and David Levy, an amateur astronomer in Tucson, Ariz., have discovered eight previous comets.

Weaver said the institute, which analyzes data from the Hubble Space Telescope, is gathering information about the comet and running computer models of what the impact will be like.

"In order for it to be a controlled experiment, you have to characterize everything associated with the experiment as well as possible," he said. "And one of the big unknowns is exactly what do we have going into Jupiter?"

Although very little is known about Shoemaker-Levy 9, scientists are estimating the force of each chunk will equal more than 10 million megatons of TNT when it strikes Jupiter's surface.

"If you add up all the nuclear weapons in the world at the height of the Cold War and set them all off at once, it might be comparable," Weaver said.

Another unknown factor in the computers' collision models is the composition of Shoemaker-Levy 9. Most scientists agree comets are mostly ice and rock, but they may contain other materials.

"We don't know precisely," Kasting said. "Comets may have delivered a lot of the Earth's volatiles."