COMET ISON UPDATE

Comet ISON is alive and well then. A portion of it survived its trip around the sun and might give us a little sky-sparkle after all. Just goes to show that there's always hope.

What's even more exciting (I read today) is another project, Rosetta, which is aiming to do something incredible. Rosetta has been chasing a comet called 67P (Churyumov-Gerasimenko) for the last few years, using Jupiter as a kind of slingshot. Next November, Rosetta will actually land a probe on the surface of the comet in a daring attempt to investigate its composition.

Comets like ISON and 67P emerge from the rocky edge of the Solar System known as the Oort Cloud. Lumps of icy rock get dislodged from the Oort Cloud from time-to-time and are slowly sucked into orbit by the gravity of the sun. As they get closer, the radiation burns off some of that icy material, pushing it out into that characteristic tail.

Considering that the comet will be moving at several thousand miles an hour, the idea of catching this unpredictable space-bullet and then clinging on to it like a barnacle is kind of extraordinary.

It makes my pedantry about technical documentation seem quite insignificant.