For many people August is holiday time, but not for me. I’m back in work after a break in July and raring to go again. And there’s so much going on. Obviously first things first, Rosetta meets the beautiful comet 67P/C-G and what a surprise that’s been for all of us to find out that it’s a binary comet. The initial shape models were completely wrong, but we were warned they might be totally inaccurate at the time. The first good images we got of 67P were so exciting, even if the comet was named the rubber duck after that (see above). Now we are just some 200km from the comet we’re starting to see the detailed texture of the surface (see image below). This is really exciting because we’ve not seen a comet in this much detail before…and it’s only going to get better as Rosetta continues to map the surface of 67P and will surely reveal even more exciting features. Fingers crossed the mission continues to go well and we can make it through to the landing phase in November.
In relation to comets and Rosetta, The Sky at Night on BBC4 this Sunday have a special programme called ‘How to Catch a Comet’ and I was interviewed for this by Maggie Aderin-Pocock, one of the show’s presenters. We spoke all about my beautiful tiny pieces of comet dust and you’ll be able to see some of these on the show. It’s also repeated a few times and it’s on iPlayer too. But first off, watch the news tomorrow because I might also be on there talking about comets to David Shukman who visited us at The Open University a few weeks ago in preparation for all of the exciting Rosetta-related news.
Other than that I’ve been trying to get the NanoSIMS up and running again after a bit of a problem. But I’ve only discovered more problems so my student is very patiently waiting to start his analyses. We’ll get there as quick as we can because he needs some data for a conference he goes to in September.