MEXICO: Scientists with the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission may have had a scare when the Philae lander bounced off of the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but the bumpy touchdown actually had a silver lining: It allowed them to take measurements in two separate spots instead of one.
Now, in a suite of papers published in the journal Science, Philae researchers have start to sketch out the comet’s physical and chemical profile — that one spot is covered in fluffy, clumpy sediments while another is caked in a hard crust; that the comet’s head is porous but fairly uniform in composition; and that there are a number of organic molecules, including four that have never before been detected on a comet.
The results are just beginning to reveal an unprecedented up-close-and-personal view of a comet — though there’s still much more to learn, mission scientists said.
The flurry of seven papers are “more or less just a collection of pixels of a picture — but I think you have to take a step back and look at all the different pixels to see if it actually gives you a picture,” said physicist Fred Goesmann, who led experiments looking at organic compounds on the comet. “It hasn’t really emerged yet what the big picture looks like.”
When the Philae lander, released by the comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft, first tried to touch down on Nov. 12 in an area later named Agilkia, it could not stick the landing. The anchoring harpoons and retro-rockets did not work and the lander bounced off the comet.
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