Results obtained can be used for other missions to comets.
Previous space missions to comets, such as Giotto and Stardust, were fly-by missions.
Past missions to comets have all been "fast flybys": They provided only a snapshot view of the dust and ice nucleus, the nebulous coma surrounding it, and how the solar wind interacts with both of these components.
The model of aggregates described in the previous section was not developed in isolation from the results of the space mission to comets.
This week ADS was celebrating the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The probe, Philae, that landed on the comet, was assembled largely in Germany.
Previous measurements by ESA's Giotto mission to comet Halley suggested that the cometary ratio is skewed more heavily towards deuterium than that on earth, and thus that the plasterers are wrong.
Rosetta was launched on March 2, 2004, by an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, on a 10-year mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The expectation was that, like the Rosetta Stone, the craft would help decode ancient history in this case, the history of the solar system.
Science's Breakthrough of the Year is the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In November, Rosetta's lander, named Philae, captured headlines around the world by touching down for the first time on the surface of a comet.
The Caroline mission would have employed aerogel as a medium for the capture of dust grains, as successfully used by the NASA Stardust mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2. We describe the proposed mission design, primary elements of the spacecraft, and provide an overview of the science instruments and their measurement goals.
"The loss of Contour would be a basic setback for the near future of cometary science," says Gerhard Schwehm of the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, who is the project scientist for the European Rosetta mission to comet Wirtanen, due to be launched on 13 January 2003.
Ptolemy is a Gas Chromatograph Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometer (GC IR MS) aboard the Philae lander element of the Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Developed to determine the chemical and stable light isotopic composition of cometary material, Ptolemy was conceived as a highly flexible instrument able to accommodate changes in operational functionality via software modification.
