[meteorite-list] The Many Faces of Rosetta's Comet 67P

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2017 15:44:07 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201703212244.v2LMi7BT023797_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6786

The Many Faces of Rosetta's Comet 67P
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
March 21, 2017

Images returned from the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission indicate
that during its most recent trip through the inner solar system, the surface
of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was a very active place - full of growing
fractures, collapsing cliffs and massive rolling boulders. Moving material
buried some features on the comet's surface while exhuming others. A study
on 67P's changing surface was released Tuesday, March 21, in the journal
Science.

"As comets approach the sun, they go into overdrive and exhibit spectacular
changes on their surface," said Ramy El-Maarry, study leader and a member
of the U.S. Rosetta science team from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
"This is something we were not able to really appreciate before the Rosetta
mission, which gave us the chance to look at a comet in ultra-high resolution
for more than two years."

Most comets orbit our sun in highly elliptical orbits that cause them
to spend most of their time in the extremely cold outer solar system.
When a comet approaches the inner solar system, the sun begins to warm
the ice on and near the comet's surface. When the ice warms enough it
can rapidly sublimate (turn directly from the solid to the vapor state).
This sublimation process can occur with variable degrees of intensity
and time-scales and cause the surface to change rapidly. Between August
2014 and September 2016, Rosetta orbited comet 67P during the comet's
swing through the inner-solar system.

"We saw a massive cliff collapse and a large crack in the neck of the
comet get bigger and bigger," said El-Maarry. "And we discovered that
boulders the size of a large truck could be moved across the comet's surface
a distance as long as one-and-a-half football fields."

In the case of the boulder, Rosetta's cameras observed a 282-million-pound
(130-million-kilogram), 100-feet-wide (30-meter) space rock to have moved
150 yards (460 feet, or 140 meters) from its original position on the
comet's nucleus. The massive space rock probably moved as a result of
several outburst events that were detected close to its original position.

The warming of 67P also caused the comet's rotation rate to speed up.
The comet's increasing spin rate in the lead-up to perihelion is thought
to be responsible for a 1,600-foot-long (500-meters) fracture spotted
in August 2014 that runs through the comet's neck. The fracture, which
originally extended a bit longer than the Empire State Building is high,
was found to have increased in width by about 100 feet (30 meters) by
December 2014. Furthermore, in images taken in June 2016, a new 500- to
1,000-foot-long (150 to 300 meters) fracture was identified parallel to
the original fracture.

"The large crack was in the 'neck' of the comet -- a small central part
that connects the two lobes," said El-Maarry. "The crack was extending--indicating
that the comet may split up one day."

Understanding how comets change and evolve with time gives us important
insights into the types and abundance of ices in comets, and how long
comets can stay in the inner solar system before losing all their ice
and becoming balls of dust," said El-Maarry. "This helps us better understand
the conditions of the early solar system, and possibly even how life started."

A link to an ESA press release with more information on the El-Maarry
paper in Science can be found here:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Before_and_after_unique_changes_spotted_on_Rosetta_s_comet

In a second Rosetta study released Tuesday, this one published in Nature
Astronomy, scientists make the first definitive link between an outburst
of dust and gas from the nucleus of 67P and the collapse of one of its
prominent cliffs, which also exposed the comet's pristine, icy interior.

A link to an ESA press release on the Nature Astronomy paper can be found
here:

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Collapsing_cliff_reveals_comet_s_interior

Comets are time capsules containing primitive material left over from
the epoch when the sun and its planets formed. Rosetta was the first spacecraft
to witness at close proximity how a comet changes as it is subjected to
the increasing intensity of the sun's radiation. Observations will help
scientists learn more about the origin and evolution of our solar system
and whether comets brought life-sustaining water and organic molecules
to the Earth.

Rosetta is an ESA mission with contributions from its member states and
NASA. Rosetta's Philae lander is provided by a consortium led by the German
Aerospace Center, Cologne; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research,
Gottingen; French National Space Agency, Paris; and the Italian Space
Agency, Rome. JPL, Pasadena, California, a division of Caltech in Pasadena,
manages the U.S. contribution of the Rosetta mission for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL also built the MIRO instrument
and hosts its principal investigator, Mark Hofstadter. The Southwest Research
Institute (San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado), developed the Rosetta orbiter's
IES and Alice instruments and hosts their principal investigators, James
Burch (IES) and Joel Parker (Alice).

For more information on the U.S. instruments aboard Rosetta, visit:

http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.gov

More information about Rosetta is available at:

http://www.esa.int/rosetta

News Media Contact
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-393-9011
agle at jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown / Laurie Cantillo
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo at nasa.gov

Markus Bauer
European Space Agency, Noordwijk, Netherlands
011-31-71-565-6799
markus.bauer at esa.int

2017-080
Received on Tue 21 Mar 2017 06:44:07 PM PDT