European Space Agency’s(ESA) Rosetta orbiter has photographed a massive landslide on a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for the first time. The comet has discharged a chunk of cliff weighing about 2000 tons and the volume was equivalent to nine Olympic swimming pools. Scientists named this cliff as “Aswan”.
The cliff was detached from 67P on July 10th, 2015. Rosetta captured both images of the comet before and after of disruption that helped scientists to measure the dimension. Before the breakage scientists noticed a one meter wide and 70-meter long crack. Lead researcher Dr. Maurizio Pajola wrote in the journal of Nature Astronomy that the cliff was 70 meters high and between 55 and 88 meters wide.
Astronomer Dr. Pajola from Nasa Ames Research Centre in California said in a statement,“The most exciting thing is that physically we have seen the interior of the comet”. After five days of disruption Rosetta’s on-board camera, OSIRIS captured fresh, sharp and bright images of Aswan.
According to Mail Online, European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft was blasted off from Earth on 2004, since then it had traveled 400 million kilometers to catch the orbit of 67P. The main purpose of the mission was to find and analyze the organic molecules of the comet and determine if it has any sign of life. It is hypothesized that liquid waters of Earth was brought by a comet and liquid water is one of the most important things to sustain life.
Rosetta ejected a probe named Philae onto the 67P’s and it had found the trace of organic molecules which is known as the basic building block of life. The Aswan cliff was captured while the comet was approaching to its perihelion. That time certain temperature changes were recorded in the Aswan, within 20 minutes the temperature was hiked from -220° Fahrenheit to 122° Fahrenheit.
One percent of the cliff’s mass was lost to space and the rest of 99 percent were distributed at the bottom of the cliff as fallen debris. However, on September 2016 Rosetta took farewell from its mission and crashed into the surface of 67P. But, the scientific instruments are still operational and the work of processing and analyzing is still ongoing.
