18 November 2014
Where is rossetta
This interactive 3D tool shows where the European Space Agency's comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft is on any given day – from launch in 2004 to the end of its nominal mission in 2015. http://sci.esa.int/where_is_rosetta/
13 August 2015
The beautiful Perseid Meteor Shower and the (possibly) dangerous comet Swift-Tuttle
... the brevity of beauty and life and general. Meanwhile, the Perseids are actually particles produced by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which has an orbit of 133 years. Humans have probably been observing Swift-Tuttle since...
June 2020
Saving Earth – time for a new cooperative framework
... restructure space agencies, and military defence agencies, to make planetary defence a priority. The impacts left by fragments of comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 hitting Jupiter in 1994 are a reminder of the danger faced by Earth (JPL/NASA/STScI) Developing...
July 2014
Preventing catastrophic impact
...effect of the collision of fragments of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet with Jupiter. They showed that the area of the resulting ... have already been carried out on many occasions to asteroids, comets and other bodies in the solar system. In such cases,...
September 2016
URBOCOP: saving planet Earth
... few decades to a few thousand years - lead to regional catastrophes. One of these occurred 12,900 years ago, when a comet nucleus a few kilometres in diameter exploded over North America. As a result of this explosion, the continent’s biosphere was...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
...of possibilities for nanosat mission flybys and encounters of future comets. The inner Solar System is fairly easy to reach... flagship Rosetta mission took 10 years to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Such long mission durations are not...
