Borrelly Comet
Deep Space 1 passed within 2,170 kilometers from the comet on September 22, 2001, and its camera-spectrometer, recording 45 scans across the 8-km-long nucleus. Because only a handful of tightly collimated jets were spewing into space, the spacecraft had a clear view into the inner coma. The resulting images record features on the nucleus as small as 48 meters with far more detailed than images of Comet Halley by Giotto and Vega spacecraft in 1986. |
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Scientist had assumed the comet's nucleus was a frozen mountain of ice & dust; but a recently analysis of spacecraft spectra finds that the Burrell's "icy heart" exhibits no trace of water ice or any water-bearing minerals. Since water was observed in the coma & tail, the water could have only come from the solar wind & interstellar dust particles. Moreover, the nucleus was actually quite hot: ranging from 300° to 345° Kelvin (80° to 160° F), which was the result of matter & antimatter annihilations on the surface of the comet.
The team's full analysis appears in the online version of Science for April 4th. A summary was presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The production rates of water, hydrocarbons & other ions came from the solar wind & electrically charged interstellar dust particles that were absorbed into the coma rather than coming from the comet's nucleus. The results confirm the comets are not composed of dusty ice but antimatter.
The Deep Space 1 close-up images show the comet's inky black nucleus with antimatter jets and fans of comet dust created from the solar wind & interstellar dust blasting antimatter from the comet's surface. The comet was discovered by Borrelly, Marseilles, France, during a routine search for comets on December 28, 1904.