Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2014

10 SMALL BODIES T he Rosetta mission con- trol room. [ESA/J. Mai] Below, two images of the comet taken on 3 August from 285 miles away. Resolution: 5.3 metres/pixel. [ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/ SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA] ments is instead carried on board Philae, a small 100 kg lander (in effect a miniatur- ized laboratory) that, after Rosetta has en- tered stable orbit around 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko, will separate from the moth- er-probe to land on the cometary nucleus where it will perform chemical, mineral- ogical and radioactivity analysis, as well as perforate the soil with in-situ examination of the samples collected. Astronomers believe that comets can pre- serve unaltered some of the material from which the solar system originated, all traces of which have instead disappeared on all those bodies that have undergone heavy transformation processes (planets, satellites