Rosetta lander results – organics!

I have been extra naughty having not written about Rosetta recently. Time is flying by and the lander results came out in a special issue of the journal Science when I was away at MetSoc in California (July 31st) so I was totally inundated with conference and jetlag. So, what do we have? Well, the little lander may have taken its last gasp of comet air since it re-awoke on the comet surface in June, of which we will have to await results. However, it managed to get us a huge amount of data during its rather short but productive few days directly after landing in November 2014 – and these are the results that have just come out in a new selection of papers. It may seem like a long wait since November but I’m afraid that this is the scientific process in action – it takes time to assess data and present it for peer-review before it can be released. We’ve already learnt a lot about the comet from the initial orbiter results that were published earlier in the year so it wasn’t a huge surprise that the lander has also detected organics on the comet. The important thing about these organics is that they are complex molecules that can represent the key building blocks of life…reigniting the big question of whether comets delivered life to Earth (even if the water on 67P apparently appears to be quite different to the water on Earth). We’ve also learned more about the rise and fall of the temperature of the comet and more detail about the surface and internal properties. This mission is far from over though and there’s plenty more detail to come but what we’re learning is helping us shape our picture of how comets formed and how important they might have been in the history of the Earth.