Posted on 01/21/2014 11:35:27 AM PST by 12th_Monkey
Rosetta, the first spacecraft built to orbit a comet and land a probe on these icy nomads, is now waking up after more than two years of slumber, and videos filmed as part of an international competition will help greet the spacecraft after it awakens.
Comets are some of the most primitive building blocks of the solar system, with many dating to soon after its formation. Comets also likely helped seed Earth with water and other ingredients of life. By analyzing the composition of the comet, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will help scientists learn more about the role comets have played in the evolution of the solar system and life on Earth. TheRosetta spacecraft launched from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana in 2004. It has since traveled around the sun five times, reaching a distance of about 500 million miles (800 million kilometers) away from the sun.
The mission's final destination is the mysterious Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which Rosetta is scheduled to reach in August. A comet is made of a solid nucleus or core surrounded by a gaseous envelope known as a coma and trailing a large tail. Rosetta will become the first spacecraft to orbit the nucleus of a comet, and in November, it will be the first to land a probe, named Philae, on a comet's surface. It will also be the first mission to escort a comet as it travels around the sun.
(please see the article at the link)
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
To me, thats damn cool.
" Comets also likely helped seed Earth with water and other ingredients of life."
Is just ...
TOO Johnny Appleseed for me to accept.
any good cook will through in a dash of this a dash of that
bttt
There's a mission out to Pluto going on.
I think it will take 9 years.
Yes, I forgot the name and dates!
Way cool..
ping
Since most scientists favor the “evolution” thing, that fits nicely into the scheme of things.
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Genesis 1:2
New Horizon.
Been following that one. Thats going to be real exciting, to bad it’s just a fly by.
I think it will take 9 years
Aww. That's too bad. They probably launched that mission when Pluto was still a planet. What are they going to do now that Pluto is just rocky debris orbiting the sun at a great distance?
I’m looking forward to pictures from the surface. Provided it makes it.
Way cool!
Minor point: As I understand it, comets do not “trail” a tail. The tail always points towards the Sun, regardless of the comet’s direction of travel.
That's the problem with Genesis. It's way short on details. I'll bet God used icy comets and other debris to fill the oceans. Same with light. Genesis should have been more specific about using a nuclear reaction to get the sun going to light the earth. And the whole 7 days thing? How long is one of God's days? I mean, for our God who has been, is and always will be in eternity, does he/she really keep a calendar based on how often our tiny world spins on its axis? You think he celebrates his own birth day?
Just some thoughts to ponder. We are such simple creations of our God. But the complexities of God's simple tasks are beyond our comprehension.
TOO Johnny Appleseed for me to accept.
Many already agree that much of earth's water came from comets. And by "ingredients for life" they mean basic molecules such as amino acids. AAc have been detected in space.
"The hunt for amino acids in extraterrestrial sources began 50 years ago when scientists discovered a variety of non-terrestrial amino acids in meteorites, remnants of asteroids that had fallen to Earth. Their discovery revolutionized the field of astrobiology, reigniting the question of whether life, as we know it, existed elsewhere in the solar system and beyond.
Amino acids, in part, hold the key to ultimately answering that question. They are the building blocks of proteins—the workhorse molecules of life, used in everything from creating hair and fingernails, to the enzymes that speed up or regulate chemical reactions inside cells. Just as the 26 letters of the alphabet are arranged in limitless combinations to make words, life uses 20 different amino acids in a huge variety of arrangements to build millions of different proteins."
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-nasa-extraterrestrial-amino-acids.html
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"Mar. 27, 2008 — Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn have detected for the first time a molecule closely related to an amino acid: amino acetonitrile. The organic molecule was found with a 30 metre radio telescope in Spain and two radio interferometers in France and Australia in the "Large Molecule Heimat", a giant gas cloud near the galactic centre in the constellation Sagittarius."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080326161658.htm
...pushes it away from the sun. Solar winds push the lighter gasses and debris away as the nuclease while the comet gravity holds it in trail.
You may know better than I. But I thought scientists have yet to observe or create a protein from AA. Or maybe it is they haven’t been able to create the DNA/Dubble Helix from protein. I forget which.
Last I heard, scientists were still working on the exact right conditions that would naturally take AA to DNA as a building block for life.
Hmmm, not sure about that.
The sun heats the surface creating a coma. the out gassing and particles from the comet surface are blown back by the solar wind creating a tail.
I agree, seems from the verse water was their already. I really have no problem with the comet seeding the Earth with water, it’s plausible.
New Horizons begins sending our first images of Pluto in less than a year. Its closest approach will be in 2015.
Inherit The Wind
Scene 2
Drummond: That first day, what do you think, it was 24 hours long?
Brady: [The] Bible says it was a day.
Drummond: Well, there was no sun out. How do you know how long it was?
Brady: The Bible says it was a day!
Drummond: Well, was it a normal day, a literal day, 24 hour day?
Brady: I don't know.
Drummond: What do you think?
Brady: I do not think about things that I do not think about.
Drummond: Do you ever think about things that you do thing about?! Isn't it possible that it could have been 25 hours? There's no way to measure it; no way to tell. Could it have been 25 hours?!
Brady: It's possible.
Drummond: Then you interpret that the first day as recorded in the Book of Genesis could've been a day of indeterminate length.
Brady: I mean to state that it is not necessarily a 24 hour day.
Drummond: It could've been 30 hours, could've been a week, could've been a month, could've been a year, could've been a hundred years, or it could've been 10 million years!!
An excellent book on this very subject, Genesis and the Big Bang is worth the read.
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