I wonder if the dust is even in it's distribution and depth. Perhaps the result of the "impact" (read: just-barely-faster-than-gradual-agglomeration) that caused to distinct bodies to merge into a "duck"? Much to learn!
Rosetta beams back colour pics: 67P shades of grey are SO HOT right now
Astro boffins working on the European Space Agency's lauded Rosetta mission, which spectacularly landed a probot on a speeding space rock last month, have revealed that Comet 67P is, well, very grey. The ESA's OSIRIS team meticulously produced a colour image of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by superimposing photos "taken …
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Monday 15th December 2014 00:56 GMT Johnny Canuck
Water???? Ice????
Appears to be mostly rock and dust. This completely blows away the theory that comets are mostly ice and that said comets deposited mega-tons of water when they (allegedly) impacted the Earth. Seems like more study is needed and this latest data will help somewhat with our own origins.
"TROLL" It has been the scientific CONSENSUS that comets deposited all our earthly water and now that seems less likely.
(Grabs popcorn and runs and hides)
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Monday 15th December 2014 03:09 GMT Trevor_Pott
Re: Water???? Ice????
1) This comet may not be representative of all comets. We don't have enough data to know for sure why it looks so different from the others.
2) This comet is from a different group of bodies than likely impacted the Earth during the late heavy bombardment. Why would all comets be the same if they formed under different circumstances
3) The surface of the comet is covered in dust. That doesn't mean the comet is all dust and rock. We'll know definitively when the thing gets close to the sun and starts heating. It could be an outer layer of dust/rock around a core of volatiles. If that's true, how did that happen? What formation process could lead to it? If it's not true, what formation process could/would lead to a rock-only or rock-predominant comet in the orbit it now occupies?
The saga of 67P is far from over...
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Monday 15th December 2014 07:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Water???? Ice????
Actually it looks a lot like a snowfield with a dusting of volcanic ash does - there too the top layer stays dirty as it melts, the dark grit "floating" on the ice because as the sun heats the rock it melts the snow beneath. On Earth the meltwater trickles down, on a comet it sublimes, but the result is an ever-dirtier snowball.
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Monday 15th December 2014 08:20 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
So on the next mission they will bring a vacuum cleaner?
Alternatively, the colour scheme was dreamed up by the same designer who labelled the black buttons in black on a black background, and when pressed a little black lamp lit up black to show that you had done it.
Only this time they used dark grey, probably chosen from one of those colour selection pages which has 24 identically coloured squares in them (at least to my insensitive male eyes, my wife swears they are different, and only number 42A matches the drapes)
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Monday 15th December 2014 10:27 GMT David Nash
RE: Water???? Ice????
"It has been the scientific CONSENSUS that comets deposited all our earthly water and now that seems less likely."
I'm afraid they beat you to it. A paper released last week concludes the same thing:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/14dec_cometwater/
There is nothing wrong with finding out that a hypothesis was not correct. That is science in action!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
