There’s a Crack Forming on Rosetta’s 67P. Is it Breaking Up?

Not all comets breakup as they vent and age, but for Rosetta’s comet 67P, the Rubber Duckie comet, a crack in the neck raises concerns. Some comets may just fizzle and uniformly expel their volatiles throughout their surfaces. They may become like puffballs, shrink some but remain intact.

Comet 67P is the other extreme. The expulsion of volatile material has led to a shape and a point of no return; it is destined to break in two. Songwriter Neil Sedaka exclaimed, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” but for comets this may be the norm. The fissure is part of the analysis in a new set of science papers published this week.

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Exciting. I wonder if Rosetta will have to get out of the way of hurtling debris as it gets closer to the sun.

Bubblecar said:

Exciting. I wonder if Rosetta will have to get out of the way of hurtling debris as it gets closer to the sun.

it might have to be moved back a bit

Latest Research Reveals a Bizarre and Vibrant Rosetta’s Comet

We’ve subsisted for months on morsels of information coming from ESA’s mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Now, a series of scientific papers in journal Science offers a much more complete, if preliminary, look at Rosetta’s comet. And what a wonderful and complex world it is.

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CrazyNeutrino said:

There’s a Crack Forming on Rosetta’s 67P. Is it Breaking Up?

Not all comets breakup as they vent and age, but for Rosetta’s comet 67P, the Rubber Duckie comet, a crack in the neck raises concerns. Some comets may just fizzle and uniformly expel their volatiles throughout their surfaces. They may become like puffballs, shrink some but remain intact.

Comet 67P is the other extreme. The expulsion of volatile material has led to a shape and a point of no return; it is destined to break in two. Songwriter Neil Sedaka exclaimed, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do,” but for comets this may be the norm. The fissure is part of the analysis in a new set of science papers published this week.

more…

Annoying. The inset of the crack at right bears no resemblance to the rectangle at left. If the crack really is through the neck as the inset suggests then there’s no question about it – Rosetta’s 67P is definitely breaking up, and soon.

On the other hand, if the rectangle at left is correct and the crack is through the centre of the small nodule then I don’t know what to expect.

I find it really strange that so many comets have cores that are peanut-shaped, with two lobes. 67P is the most extreme case, but Halley’s comet is very similar, and so are Hartley 2 and Borelly. Of the six comets visited by spacecraft, four are peanut-shaped.

The asteroids Eros, Braille and Itokawa are also peanut-shaped, three out of eleven.

It’s extremely common for comets to break up as they approach the Sun, or Jupiter. These include 3D/Biela, 73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann and great comets West and Ikeya–Seki. The results can be spectacular.

My greatest hope is that Rosetta’s 67P breaks in half in such a way that Philae, now in the sunshine, comes back to life.

very close binary system.

For some recent images of Rosetta, including the crack, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/23/

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released details of the first bushel of studies derived from the Rosetta spacecraft’s visit to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

The journal Science has devoted a special issue to seven studies of the comet, but let’s do a summary here.

67P is fluffy, or at least “has a very high porosity of 70–80%, with the interior structure likely comprising weakly bonded ice-dust clumps with small void spaces between them”. The comet is comprised of 19 regions “separated by distinct geomorphological boundaries” and named after ancient Egyptian deities.

The ESA says the five types of region are:

Dust-covered spots like Ma’at, Ash and Babi;
Areas containing brittle materials with pits and circular structures (Seth)
Large-scale depressions (Hatmehit, Nut and Aten);
Smooth terrains (Hapi, Imhotep and Anubis);
Rock-like surfaces (Maftet, Bastet, Serqet, Hathor, Anuket, Khepry, Aker, Atum and Apis).
Dusty regions produce features that look a lot like terrestrial dunes and boulders with “wind tails”
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Perhaps the person who named all these was a Stargate fan :(

JudgeMental said:

very close binary system.

This will be great to watch.