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Comet Nishimura
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Comet Nishimura l Gerald Rhemann (via)
Why Landing on a Comet is Amazing
“Now imagine, instead of trying to land on an object that’s attracting you, you’re trying to land on, basically, a speck of dust. Not that a comet or asteroid is as small as a speck of dust, but it has virtually no gravitational attraction at all.”
Launched from the Rosetta satellite, on a mission 10 years in the making, the space probe Philae just successfully landed on a comet, the first time in history humanity has managed to make such a thing happen. But other than sounding cool, what have we gained? Here’s a redux of the technical challenges and achievements, the scientific knowledge to come and when we can expect the payoff!
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This is truly incredible.
Remember Rosetta? That comet-chasing European Space Agency (ESA) probe that deployed (and accidentally bounced) its lander Philae on the surface of Comet 67P? This GIF is made up of images Rosetta beamed back to Earth, which have been freely available online for a while. But it took Twitter user landru79 processing and assembling them into this short, looped clip to reveal the drama they contained.
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Comet ISON appeared in the higher-resolution HI-1 camera on NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft. Dark “clouds” coming from the right are more dense areas in the solar wind, causing ripples in Comet Encke’s tail. Using comet tails as tracers can provide valuable data about solar wind conditions near the sun.
Image Credit: Karl Battams/NASA/STEREO/CIOC, via NASA.gov
Source: nasa.gov