Post by Andrei Tchentchik on Jul 8, 2019 17:37:01 GMT 2
(.#240).- Rosetta unveils a comet with tormented landscapes.
Probe Rosetta unveils a comet with tormented landscapes.
By Tristan Vey & Cyrille Vanlerberghe - Posted on 22/01/2015 at 20:02
"This spectacular photo is representative of the wide variety of structures on the surface," says Holger Sierks, director of the Osiris camera, at the Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen. The spur that looks like a mountain is actually only 60 m high, and overlooks a slope covered with fine dust reminiscent of a field of powder dotted with rocks. "Be careful, it's not snow, but very dark dust that was ejected from the comet before falling on it," says the researcher. The cliffs and boulders are not rocky, but made of a porous and friable material, a mixture of organic matter and ice. ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS MPS Team / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA.
Scientists from the European mission have published the first close-up views of the surface of comet 67P / Churyumov-Guerassimenko. They reveal an unknown and strange world of which no one had suspected the complexity.
Finally! The team responsible for the Osiris instrument, the high-definition cameras mounted on the European probe Rosetta, unveiled Thursday evening in the journal Science close-ups of comet 67P / Churyumov-Guerassimenko. Expected since the arrival in orbit of the probe around the comet last summer, thirty unpublished clichés reveal a variety of unsuspected landscapes: cliffs, excessive wells, landslides, dust deserts, dunes, cracks, etc. The researchers, on the other hand, found only one meteorite impact, and for good reason: every six years, at each passage near the Sun, the surface of this 4km long body is vaporized over two meters of thickness, reshaping the landscape.
For now, the origin of these complex structures on a body where gravity is 100,000 times lower than on Earth remains a mystery. "There is also a kind of contradiction between the global aspect that suggests a very rigid material and the very low density of the comet (about half of that of water)," notes Laurent Jorda, member of the Osiris team at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory. The porosity is very large, but we do not know if it is microscopic or if there are large voids below the surface. "
Organic compounds
In addition to the two articles that decipher these images, five new studies are also published in the same issue of Science. The Virtis spectrometer has already detected the expected presence of organic compounds, without yet being able to characterize them. The RPC instrument spotted the birth of a magnetosphere under the action of the solar wind. The other three relate to the analysis of the activity of the comet. In particular the quantity of dust and water vapor emitted or the local and temporal variation of these ejections of matter.
F I N .
Probe Rosetta unveils a comet with tormented landscapes.
By Tristan Vey & Cyrille Vanlerberghe - Posted on 22/01/2015 at 20:02
"This spectacular photo is representative of the wide variety of structures on the surface," says Holger Sierks, director of the Osiris camera, at the Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen. The spur that looks like a mountain is actually only 60 m high, and overlooks a slope covered with fine dust reminiscent of a field of powder dotted with rocks. "Be careful, it's not snow, but very dark dust that was ejected from the comet before falling on it," says the researcher. The cliffs and boulders are not rocky, but made of a porous and friable material, a mixture of organic matter and ice. ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS MPS Team / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA.
Scientists from the European mission have published the first close-up views of the surface of comet 67P / Churyumov-Guerassimenko. They reveal an unknown and strange world of which no one had suspected the complexity.
Finally! The team responsible for the Osiris instrument, the high-definition cameras mounted on the European probe Rosetta, unveiled Thursday evening in the journal Science close-ups of comet 67P / Churyumov-Guerassimenko. Expected since the arrival in orbit of the probe around the comet last summer, thirty unpublished clichés reveal a variety of unsuspected landscapes: cliffs, excessive wells, landslides, dust deserts, dunes, cracks, etc. The researchers, on the other hand, found only one meteorite impact, and for good reason: every six years, at each passage near the Sun, the surface of this 4km long body is vaporized over two meters of thickness, reshaping the landscape.
For now, the origin of these complex structures on a body where gravity is 100,000 times lower than on Earth remains a mystery. "There is also a kind of contradiction between the global aspect that suggests a very rigid material and the very low density of the comet (about half of that of water)," notes Laurent Jorda, member of the Osiris team at the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory. The porosity is very large, but we do not know if it is microscopic or if there are large voids below the surface. "
Organic compounds
In addition to the two articles that decipher these images, five new studies are also published in the same issue of Science. The Virtis spectrometer has already detected the expected presence of organic compounds, without yet being able to characterize them. The RPC instrument spotted the birth of a magnetosphere under the action of the solar wind. The other three relate to the analysis of the activity of the comet. In particular the quantity of dust and water vapor emitted or the local and temporal variation of these ejections of matter.
F I N .
