Cosmic puzzle settled: Comets give us shooting stars

Suspicions that shooting stars come from comet dust, transformed into fiery streaks as they hit Earth's atmosphere, have been bolstered by Europe's Rosetta space mission, scientists reported Monday.

Rosetta's comet surrounded by dusty cloud

Anyone who's ever read a Charlie Brown comic strip knows "Pig-Pen", the lovable boy who walks around in a constant cloud of his own dirt and dust. Every time he sighs, dust rises in a little cloud around him. Why bother to ...

Leonid meteor shower best views before dawn November 17, 2014

A "streaky" meteor shower will be at its best before dawn on Monday, November 17, according to the editors of StarDate magazine. Unfortunately, this won't be one of its better years, as the partially illuminated Moon will ...

A close-up with a comet

Even as Tom Economou approached retirement age in 1994, he began planning an instrument for the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to a comet. He still remembers the reaction of Riccardo Levi-Setti, then director of ...

Mars spacecraft reveal comet flyby effects on Martian atmosphere

Two NASA and one European spacecraft, including NASA's MAVEN mission led by the University of Colorado Boulder, have gathered new information about the basic properties of a wayward comet that buzzed by Mars Oct. 19, directly ...

Rosetta: The dark side of the comet

(Phys.org) —Rosetta's scientific imaging system OSIRIS has caught a glimpse of the southern side of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. During the past months, this side has continuously faced away from the Sun making it impossible ...

Mars Orbiter's spectrometer shows Oort comet's coma

The Compact Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) observed comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring as the comet sped close to Mars on Oct. 19. CRISM recorded imaging data in 107 different wavelengths, showing the inner part of the ...

Image: Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

It was 45 years ago when astronomer Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko, one of his researchers, unwittingly began a new chapter in the history of space exploration.

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