Summer Shorts: A Cometary Rubber Duck
It’s summer in the northern hemisphere of a small, damp, planet orbiting a middle-aged star in a spiral galaxy of matter enjoying a brief heyday before colliding with another galaxy in some 4 billion orbits of the same small, damp, planet.
By Caleb A. Scharf
This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
It's summer in the northern hemisphere of a small, damp, planet orbiting a middle-aged star in a spiral galaxy of matter enjoying a brief heyday before colliding with another galaxy in some 4 billion orbits of the same small, damp, planet. Time for some brief stories.
Rosetta images of comet nucleus from 3,400 kilometers away (ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team)
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ESA's Rosetta mission, reported on in an earlier post, has got close enough to its cometary quarry to discover that 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is not as simple as anyone thought - it's a double nucleus, a giant rubber duck of a thing. Here's a timelapse (below) of 36 images taken by Rosetta from a distance of approximately 7,500 kilometers, each separated by 20 minutes, and heavily interpolated. A brighter 'ring' of material seems to exist at the apparent neck joining these sub-nuclei (see the above image too). The big question now is where and how will the lander Philae try to set down?
(ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team)
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