Rosetta reveals a complex comet
‘Dirty snowball’ model dashed by images of diverse terrain
It’s time to stop thinking of comets as dirty snowballs. The Rosetta spacecraft’s first look at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko shows a diverse, complex world, shaped by eruptions and erosion, that may hint at what the solar system was like 4.6 billion years ago.
A panoply of textures and structures shows that comet 67P is not a loose collection of ice and dust, the prevailing image of comets for decades.
“Rosetta has blown the dirty snowball idea out of the water,” says Nicolas Thomas, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and member of the Rosetta team.