• Question: What information have you discovered through the Rosetta mission?

    Asked by Emma to Laurence on 9 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Laurence O'Rourke

      Laurence O'Rourke answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Hi Emma, great question and I could write for a long time on it; when I give presentations in schools then I explain a lot about it. With the Rosetta mission, we’ve discovered

      – how a comet lives in its journey around the sun : far away it is a block of ice & dirt, when it gets closer the ice changes to gas and the dirt is released as dust which produces the long tail, when it is very close to the sun then you get explosions on the surface, then when it moves away it starts to quieten down to finally become that block of ice/dirt once more

      – what it is made of : lots of carbon (coal) dust covering a huge block of ice which is layered like an onion and contains many many different types of gases which are solidified as ice

      – why it is important for life on Earth : clearly it has water inside it but also we’ve found the building blocks of complex organic molecules i.e. things that are the very smallest part of DNA, on the surface.

      We continue to observe it on a daily basis and learn new things; it’s a pretty amazing mission.

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