COSIMA watches #comet shed its dusty coat
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/01/26/cosima-watches-comet-shed-its-dusty-coat
Early results from #rosetta's COmetary Secondary Ion Mass Analyser (COSIMA) are published today in the journal Nature. The study covers August to October, when the comet moved along its orbit between about 535 million kilometres to 450 million kilometres from the Sun, and when Rosetta was orbiting the comet at distances of 30 km or less. This news item is also published on the ESA Portal. COSIMA is one of Rosetta’s three dust analysis experiments. It started collecting, imaging and measuring the composition of dust particles shortly after the spacecraft arrived at the comet in August 2014. The scientists looked at the way that many large dust grains broke apart when they were collected on the instrument’s target plate, typically at low speeds of 1–10 m/s. The grains, which were originally at (...)
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