Posted on 02/16/2015 8:09:47 AM PST by Citizen Zed
As small as the comet is, it actually has a very small gravitational field. It’s incredible to think a rock that small has enough attraction to keep those rocks on the surface.
Interesting info about the failed Philae lander...
...the lander did not just touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko once, but three times.
The harpoons did not fire and Philae appeared to be rotating after the first touchdown, which indicated that it had lifted from the surface again....it touched the surface at 15:34, 17:25 and 17:32 GMT.
The first touchdown was inside the predicted landing ellipse, confirmed using the lander’s downwards-looking ROLIS descent camera in combination with the orbiter’s OSIRIS images to match features.
But then the lander lifted from the surface again – for 1 hour 50 minutes. During that time, it travelled about 1 km at a speed of 38 cm/s. It then made a smaller second hop, travelling at about 3 cm/s, and landing in its final resting place seven minutes later.
Dirty snowball or snowy dirtball?
Na!
Not a trace of ice anywhere.
I'm not seeing a dirty snowball here. I'm seeing a dirty hailstone, the kind of condensated layering of an object that passed time after time through temperature variations and vapor. And that's stranger than it might seem, at least in this star system as it is now.
Look for someone with more credibility to announce the same idea.
Another interesting thing are the boulders standing on delicate-looking thin pedestals in the weak gravity. Rosetta will be lucky not to get clobbered by one before this tour is over.
Rosetta is the probe taking the photographs.
I’ll bet that flat area in the middle is an old lava flow.
That was my thought. The comet is traveling at 500 KM a second with very little gravity. You would think sand and rocks would be flying off it.
Best answer I got as to why = space is a vacuum so there is no resistance to make it fly off.
Very interesting still
In the lower left quadrant, angled about 60 degrees, there is a section that looks sedimentary, lots of slim layers.
is this one slid rock or two that are just held together by gravity?
I bet when this goes around the sun it splits into two.
Does anyone know when that is supposed to happen?
My mistake.
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Yep, that thing looks just like an oort cloud!
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A giant ball of mud, orbiting the Sun and the Earth.
Beats Ansel Adams any day!
Well worth the cost...
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>> “I’ll bet that flat area in the middle is an old lava flow.” <<
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Yep, ‘bout 4500 years old.
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>> “No craters” <<
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Its a chunk of ejecta, not a planet!
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Like it cycled through a cloud, like a hailstone, on an aeon-scale.
It looks like a big chunk of earth
Very possibly volcanic ejecta.
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