This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
It's summer in the northern hemisphere of a small, damp, planet orbiting a middle-aged star in a spiral galaxy of matter enjoying a brief heyday before colliding with another galaxy in some 4 billion orbits of the same small, damp, planet. Time for some brief stories.
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ESA's Rosetta mission, reported on in an earlier post, has got close enough to its cometary quarry to discover that 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is not as simple as anyone thought - it's a double nucleus, a giant rubber duck of a thing. Here's a timelapse (below) of 36 images taken by Rosetta from a distance of approximately 7,500 kilometers, each separated by 20 minutes, and heavily interpolated. A brighter 'ring' of material seems to exist at the apparent neck joining these sub-nuclei (see the above image too). The big question now is where and how will the lander Philae try to set down?