The meeting between the Tchouri comet and the Sun, under the eye of Rosetta, on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, has enriched the abundant harvest of data gathered by the European orbiter, which will help to better understand the origin of life on Earth.
The comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko reached its perihelion, that is to say the point on its orbit that is closest to the Sun at 2:03 UTC (GMT) or 4:03 am Paris time.
According to images taken by the navigation camera NavCam of the probe, the comet has shown “very active” at night, told AFP Sylvain Lodiot, in charge of Rosetta operations ESOC (European Space Operations Centre) in Germany. “There are jets of gas and dust a little everywhere,” he said.
The other camera Rosetta, Osiris, also took spectacular images of the comet full degassing. It was unveiled by the European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday afternoon.
The comet, which is made of ice, minerals and organic particles, was then at 186 million km Sun and 265 million km from Earth.
The European probe Rosetta attended the show at a safe distance of 330 km. It was indeed necessary that its rating sensors which allow it to move, are not disrupted by debris and dust which escape increasingly from the comet due to the proximity to the sun.
All the instruments of the probe were active to take pictures, capture dust grains, smell the gas.
However, the small robot Philae, hosted for nine months on the comet, and not very fit, could only remain silent, the probe being too far from him to establish communication.
“Rosetta is in perfect working order,” said Mr. Lodiot. “It continues its journey” with the comet which now away from the Sun.
At each passage near the Sun every six and a half years, the small comet loses tens of centimeters.
– grains that have been seeding the oceans –
“As there is a delayed effect, the maximum activity of the comet will likely take place shortly after the perihelion passage,” he said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of CNES, the French space agency, told AFP.
“Rosetta is watching. We get extraordinary data. The harvest continues,” did -he added.
The aim of the mission was launched there over 20 years, is to better understand the evolution of the solar system since birth there 4.6 billion years , comets are considered remnants of primitive matter.
The Rosetta mission found that “the comet is not essentially a block is 80% ice and would have trapped all rest, “contrary to what we previously thought, said on France Inter radio the French academic Jean-Pierre Bibring, scientific director of Philae.
” The bottom of the cometary material is made of organic grains of large size “of up to several millimeters and made of very complex macromolecules made of carbon and nitrogen, there was added.
“It is these grains that have the ability to travel and possibly seeding the oceans’ land, has he said.
With Rosetta and Philae,” we believe we have before us the material from which, once seeded the oceans, life could emerge “on Earth, he assured.
” All organic molecules necessary for emergence of life are present on 67P “notes Nicolas Altobelli, a planetary scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), told AFP.
The adventure of Rosetta, traveling for over eleven years in space, scheduled for completion in September 2016. To date, ESA has planned to make her “ask” as little as possible about roughly where it Tchouri find Philae, which will be asleep for a long time.
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