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This article was published on 24 August 2014 at 15:49.
The last change is the 24 August 2014 at 16:22.
Rosetta, the European Space Agency ESA probe, is continuing to fill in the ID card C67P of the comet, its target of just 4.5 x 3.5 km with pinpoint accuracy achieved after ten years of travel in the solar system. Now Rosetta is just 80 miles from the comet by the strange shape of a peanut made “L” and was able to measure the mass going around and considering how much gravitational pull of the comet the same exercises. The number that comes out is ghostly at first sight, the gigantic “space rock” has a mass of no less than 10 billion tons. Given that the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour has a mass of 30,000 tons the account is easily done: comet equal 100,000 aircraft carrier.
Huge then? Not at all, given that by calculating the volume of the comet itself is a density of only 300 pounds per cubic meter. Surprise: the comet, if you could put in a terrestrial ocean, at the bottom is not so great, would float like a piece of pumice stone, the one that once used during ablutions in bagne and that every so often you see a small float pieces into the sea.
This figure, created all things in a simple way, tells us a lot of the celestial body. For example, that is, as expected, a mixture of dust, rock and ice very porous and perhaps, we emphasize perhaps, could have caves inside as in the famous movie “Deep Impact”. This can be deduced from the total weight: to get it you have to “lighten” the comet itself: it’s either a gruyere, prudence to say, or the material of which it is composed is lighter than expected. We will see. The data obtained is also crucial to drive the main probe, Rosetta, who now must orbit closer to the comet, and prevent it from being attracted and crashes on it. From the point of view of motion in fact it is as if the probe was a small ball of iron that must be close to a magnet can study enough but not too much from being captured.
Must go near it because, in November, detaches from the small probe named Philae middle and try to land on the comet to study in situ. Source of pride for our country is that the drill of small means, which is essential to extract samples to be analyzed, it is Italian, developed by Politecnico di Milano with a truly ingenious technology, the best existing nowadays, that only we are able to develop and that will also be used in the Mars missions. Where it will land this little robotic explorer we’ll know in the next few hours, when it will be made public before a list of 5 sites on the comet of you think reasonably, from the first analysis of the received images, that we can appoggiare- For the moment we must be content to watch and the fascinating images that come to us all the time, showing us a body frastagliatissimo, full of small craters, some of which, the largest, the edges have extraordinarily high, as if it were a stone dropped in a pond raising a wave, immediately frozen. As these craters were formed, for the time being unique? for all we know. And why this strange curved shape, as if someone had put together two different comets and had welded together by forming a single.
As you get the information and pictures, unfortunately released by Esa only in low resolution, it increases the wonder for this item and hope that Rosetta and Philae solve many of the mysteries that these stones icy wandering in cosmos bring with them, are pieces of the origins of the solar system, and perhaps even our own.
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