WASHINGTON: Comet 67P is getting hot and bothered. Dramatic pictures from outbursts on the increasingly active comet are being returned by the chasing probe Rosetta as it hurtles round the sun.
Thursday marks perihelion — the point where the comes closest to our star during it’s 6.5-year orbit around the solar system.
Rosetta scientists report on the mission website that this a landmark moment because the intensity of sunlight increases and parts of the comet that may have been in darkness for years are exposed to the sunlight.
The Rosetta blog explains that the energy warms the comet’s ices, turning them into gas which pours into space and drags dust with it.
This material forms a comet’s distinctive tail that can stretch for hundreds of thousands of miles into space.
The European Space Agency (ESA), which is leading a consortium that includes NASA to find out more about a comet’s composition and how it interacts with the sun, says comet activity is expected to peak in the weeks after perihelion but sudden outbursts can happen at any time — as the probe’s picture from the end of July shows.
Commenting on the mission website Carsten Guttler, from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, said: “Usually, the jets are quite faint compared to the nucleus and we need to stretch the contrast of the images to make them visible – but this one is brighter than the nucleus.”
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
