Publication Date:
2004-06-19
Description:
Images taken by the Stardust mission during its flyby of 81P/Wild 2 show the comet to be a 5-kilometer oblate body covered with remarkable topographic features, including unusual circular features that appear to be impact craters. The presence of high-angle slopes shows that the surface is cohesive and self-supporting. The comet does not appear to be a rubble pile, and its rounded shape is not directly consistent with the comet being a fragment of a larger body. The surface is active and yet it retains ancient terrain. Wild 2 appears to be in the early stages of its degradation phase as a small volatile-rich body in the inner solar system.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Brownlee, Donald E -- Horz, Friedrich -- Newburn, Ray L -- Zolensky, Michael -- Duxbury, Thomas C -- Sandford, Scott -- Sekanina, Zdenek -- Tsou, Peter -- Hanner, Martha S -- Clark, Benton C -- Green, Simon F -- Kissel, Jochen -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Jun 18;304(5678):1764-9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. brownlee@astro.washington.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15205524" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Cosmic Dust
;
Gases
;
*Meteoroids
;
Spacecraft
;
Water
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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