Sounds like a lot of homes I have been in over the course of my long and unillustrious life...
So no ice is visible, and no ice is confirmed, and no ice can survive a close encounter with the sun, but because the drill (made, no doubt, out of tungsten), couldn’t penetrate more than a few milimeters, the hardness of what stopped that drill is somehow comparable to ice, and therefore despite all the rock and dust, and not confirming ice, and not seeing any ice - it’s ice.
M’kay. Next mission.
This is all very cool.
The United States will top it in a few months when a probe will make a close flyby of Pluto.
They are probably learning more dealing with these problems than if the mission had gone completely as planned.
Half a foot of dust ......????
Geez I got that beat in my apartment......
A block of ice instead of a dirty snowball. We learn something even in failure.
I thought ice couldn’t form under the vacuum conditions of space?
And if a comet is rock, what’s all that stuff streaming off it?
I’m waiting for papers.
So the results are rather inconclusive. For me, thats a good reason to do it again with the next comet to pass by. Maybe the results of these measurements can help us tweak the instrument package we plant on the next one, but we should definitely do it again.
They should use a tiny nuclear source, like Cassini, so they aren’t dependent on solar power. That seems silly, to go to all that time and expense and you’re depending on a solar panel to catch sunlight from a zillion miles away.
I wish the satellite headed for Pluto would drop a lander on the surface there too.
Organic? How many carbon atoms are there in an ammonia molecule?
Waiting for a report on petrology and mineralogy.
Give every NASA scientist $50. Send them to local pubs.
There, the dart board will have a dust-covered diamond as the center.
Let the scientists see who can throw their dart and get it to stick in the diamond.
Nobody?
OK, sell NASA to India, or maybe Fiji.
Before one of these ‘probes’ lands on something, sticks its tool into a sleeping asteroi-nat, which then sniffs its way back along the lengthy ten-year path thru the cosmos ... to earth. Also, “bzzz” -ing all the time, to the delight of some space sleuths, but otherwise pretty much starting a 10-year global panic.
The leftists will be screaming GLOBAL WARNING!
The GOPe will disregard everybody and everything except the golf course.