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Capabilities of Philae, the Rosetta Lander

Biele, J.; Ulamec, S.

In situ (and sample return) space missions are the most promising tools to investigate the origin and evolution of comet nuclei. We present the instruments and investigations that will be performed with PHILAE (the ROSETTA Lander) on comet 67P Churyumov Gerasimenko, starting in November 2014, ten years after launch. The rationale and the performan…

Loss of the Surface Layers of Comet Nuclei

Keller, H. U.; Thomas, N.; Alexander, C.

The Deep Impact observations of low thermal inertia for comet 9P/Tempel 1 are of profound importance for the observations to be made by the Rosetta spacecraft at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. While sub-surface sublimation is necessary to explain the observations, the depth at which this occurs is no more than 2 3 cm and possibly less. The low t…

Composition Measurements of a Comet from the Rosetta Orbiter Spacecraft

Alexander, C.; Gulkis, S.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta Spacecraft, launched on March 2, 2004 toward Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (C-G), carries a complementary set of instruments on both the orbiter and lander (Philae) portions of the spacecraft, to measure the composition of the Comet C-G. The primary composition measuring instruments on the Orbiter are Alic…

Rapporteur Paper on the Composition of Comets

Altwegg, Kathrin

The ISSI workshop on “Origin and evolution of comet nuclei” had the goal to put together recent scientific findings concerning the “life” of a comet from the formation of the material in a dark molecular cloud to the accretion in the early solar system, from cometesimals to comet nuclei which were shaped and altered by cosmic rays, by radioisotopi…