Skip to footer

Rosetta pictures of summer fireworks on comet 67P explained

In a study published Friday, scientists reported that the fireworks captured by Rosetta spacecraft’s camera during its two-year, close-up study of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko were coming from the comet’s surface.

|
Courtesy of ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team
Compilation of the brightest outbursts seen at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera and Navigation Camera between July and September 2015.

In a study published Friday, scientists report that the fireworks captured by Rosetta spacecraft’s camera during its two-year, close-up study of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko came from the comet’s surface.

Rosetta's photos featured 34 outbursts that it captured last summer as it made its closest approach to the comet, which belongs to the Jupiter family of comets. The European spacecraft had been traveling close to the comet for months in order to analyze its surface. The outbursts were more violent than the predictable jets of dust and gas ejected by a comet when it is illuminated by the sun, possibly because the material was coming from deep inside the frozen comet and bursting out of constrained spaces.

“The team found that just over half of the events occurred in regions corresponding to early morning, as the sun began warming up the [comet’s] surface after many hours in darkness,” the European Space Agency, which manages the Rosetta mission, reported in an announcement. “The rapid change in local temperature is thought to trigger thermal stresses in the surface that might lead to a sudden fracturing and exposure of volatile material. This material rapidly heats up and vaporizes explosively,” reported the agency.

The news comes a week before Rosetta’s retirement after an illustrious 12-year career in space, where the craft helped astronomers study the composition of 67P in the most detailed study of a comet ever. 

As The Christian Science Monitor has reported, comets offer scientists clues to the formation of our solar system:

Comets, along with asteroids, represent the construction rubble left over from the solar system's planet-building stage some 4.5 billion years ago. Comets in particular are thought to carry some of the most pristine ingredients the young sun and its extended disk of dust and gas had to offer as raw material for planets. Comets also are known to carry organic compounds and are thought to be one type of vehicle that delivered water and organic chemicals to Earth – chemicals that could serve as building blocks for more-complex molecules underpinning organic life.

ESA is planning to begin shutting Rosetta down on September 30, after its gentle, 15-hour drop to the surface of the comet from a height of about 12 miles, as The Guardian reports.

Rosetta will land in a region that appears to release the comet’s dust and gas. The plan is to have its onboard camera, Osiris, peer inside the pit that releases the materials to gather more information about the comet’s geology. Eventually Rosetta’s instruments and transmitter will be switched off and it will join Philae, a probe that it released to the comet’s surface in 2014, in retirement. Philae is famous for capturing the first-ever photos from the surface of a comet.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Rosetta pictures of summer fireworks on comet 67P explained
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0923/Rosetta-pictures-of-summer-fireworks-on-comet-67P-explained
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe