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Eye of a skull reveals details of cometary materials

The Philae spacecraft was meant to anchor itself to the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, but instead bounced into a hidden grotto. The telltale markings of its passage reveal details of the comet’s fragile boulders.
  1. Erik Asphaug

    1. Erik Asphaug is in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Department of Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA.

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Astronomers are often like the proverbial blind men touching an elephant: one holds the tusk and thinks it’s a bull; another grabs the tail and decides it’s a horse; and a third feels the trunk and says it’s a snake. Humans rarely get to touch anything in space — so far, only the Moon. Robotic landers and probes have extended our reach to the surfaces of Mars, Venus, Titan and a handful of asteroids and comets, but in each case they have yet to reveal the whole ‘animal’. This is especially true of comets, the denizens of the outer Solar System that sometimes make close approaches to the Sun, and whose progenitors contributed to the inventory of organic and volatile compounds in early Earth1.

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Nature 586, 675-676 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02941-x

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