NEW YORK: A team of researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Caltech say that comets have an overall structure that resembles nothing so much as deep fried ice cream.
Murthy Gudipati from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the leader of the study, says that the crust of a typical comet is crystallized ice, while the interiors are composed of more porous and colder materials. Organic matter is akin to a final layer of chocolate over everything, Gudipati added.
The JPL scientist, alongside Caltech team leader Antti Lignell, used an icebox-like instrument dubbed “Himalaya” in a laboratory setting in order to simulate the conditions that comets would experience deep in space. The scientists discovered that the otherwise soft and fluffy ice on the comet’s surface would harden and crystallize as the comet slowly nears the sun and begins to warm up. During the formation of this hard, crystalline shell, other molecules on the comets surface containing carbon are shed and lost into space, leaving behind a brittle crust with a powdery coating of organic materials.
Gudipati said that the lab experiments – that showcased how comet crusts crystallized with that dusting of organics – certainly matches what observations of comets from space have already suggested. The perfect analogy, according to the NASA scientist, is indeed deep fried ice cream, as cometary interiors are likely to still be much colder than the surface and be more porous than crystalline.
The observations Gudipati refers to are undoubtedly data gathered by NASA’s Deep Impact probe and especially the Philae lander from the European Space Agency’s much more recent Rosetta mission to Comet 67P. Philae in particular was of great interest to the scientific world, as it was the first time a man-made object had ever made a soft landing on a comet; while its bumpy landing left the lander in a place where the efficacy of its solar array in recharging the probe’s batteries was largely useless, Philae gathered and transmitted some highly important data back to Earth before it fell silent for the time being.
