Near-Earth objects (NEOs) like asteroids are both a fascinating and a terrifying phenomenon for humanity, with the power to obliterate all life on our home world and the possibility of providing us with the raw materials of our high-tech existence long after we’ve bled the Earth dry, if ambitious asteroid miners are to be believed.
Despite their potential importance though, these and other rocky bodies of our Solar System don’t present easy targets for study. The European Space Agency is in the midst of a billion-euro scheme to land on a comet for the first time, using the Rosetta spacecraft, which hopes to chase down and visit Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August this year.
Before the Rosetta mission, all other comet and asteroid mission have been flybys and observatory and telescopic snaps, attempts to study these celestial bodies through imagery and observation. While that has been good for working out what the surface of asteroids and comets are like, it’s been less informative about space rocks’ interiors, until now...
Read the rest over on Forbes.
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