Rainbow comet with a heart of sponge
07/09/2020
A permeable heart with a hardened facade the resting place of Rosettas lander on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is revealing more about the interior of the 'rubber duck' shaped-body looping around the Sun.
A recent study suggests that the comets interior is more porous than the material near the surface. The results confirm that solar radiation has significantly modified the comets surface as it travels through space between the orbits of Jupiter and Earth. Heat from the Sun triggers an ejection and subsequent falling back of material.
Location, location, location. That was key for the radar instrument on the Rosetta spacecraft and its Philae lander, which was designed to probe the comets nucleus. The CONSERT experiment involved two antennas sending precise signals to each other. But when Philae went missing upon landing on November 2014, scientists had to work with estimated values.
Philae operated for over two days on the surface 63 hours, to be precise.
We managed to define the region where the lander was with a margin of about 150 m. The real landing site was in this region, explains Wlodek Kofman, emeritus principal investigator of CONSERT.
More:
http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/09/Rainbow_comet_with_a_heart_of_sponge