Rosetta Finds Another Stone

Boulder_flying_by_cometBy Taral Wayne: Remember those science fiction movies where a spaceship in the asteroid belt would be pelted by fist-sized rocks and be forced to dodge tumbling boulders ranging in size from VW vans to small states?  In reality, spaceships pass through the asteroid belt without seeing so much as as a speck of dust, except by using very long distance cameras. Space is empty, dude!  Even the crowded bits are mostly empty vacuum. However, the cameras of the Rosetta spacecraft have caught a very rare bit of footage recently, yet somehow the media has missed it entirely!

Here is footage of a large boulder passing by Comet 67P at the end of July. ESA scientists don’t know how large it is because they can’t estimate its distance accurately.  Their guesses put it at between roughly 1 and 50 meters … approximately between 3 and 165 feet. It is too large, and its trajectory obviously rules out the comet as its origin, so it appears to be a genuine piece of the inner edge of the asteroid belt going by.  It must be in a similar orbit, as the relative velocities are not high.

10 thoughts on “Rosetta Finds Another Stone

  1. The odds of that close a pass must be astronomical. We’re incredibly lucky to have seen that

  2. @Lorcan Nagle The odds of that close a pass must be astronomical. We’re incredibly lucky to have seen that

    The Alien Masters are curious to see what our technologies are like at this point in our history. We can safely ignore the man behind the curtain.

  3. @Lorcan Nagle: The odds of that close a pass must be astronomical.
    I see what you did there.

  4. ESA scientists don’t know how large it is because they can’t estimate its distance accurately.

    It’s hard when you don’t have anything to use as a reference for distance or scale. (Birdwatchers are familiar with the problem: is it a larger bird and far away, or a smaller one and close?)

  5. Comparing the video with my mental image of the comet, I don’t know how anyone could come up with an estimate for this rock’s size that is as low as one meter. Something that small would be little more than a pixel or two even in Rosetta’s sharpest, close-up images — which this is not. I’d go with the larger estimate — 50 meters.

  6. Reminds me one of my favourite Pirx the Pilot stories where Pirx encounters a massive dead alien ship drifting through the asteroid belt where his own ship shouldn’t be, but he can’t record the location and the bearing because of the incompetencies of himself and his ship mates, no one has loaded up the astronavigator computer’s tape.

  7. I actually remember that scene … which is a small miracle, because I’ve only seen one season, on a bootlegged copy of the DVD I made from a loaner.

  8. Say, here’s a thought… they never did pinpoint exactly where the Philae lander touched down. You don’t suppose the comet burbed and threw Philae back into space, do you? it’s about the right shape for it. ; )

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