Traces left by robot Philae found in early ice of Comet Chury

• Astrophysics: Comet 'Chury' arrived in the Solar System only 10,000 years ago

• End of mission: Rosetta probe 'rests' already on comet 'Chury'

The descent of the robot

to Comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko could hardly have been more exciting and rugged.

On November 12, 2014 and after a long journey of 10 years, it detached itself from the

spacecraft

, which was left flying, to make the first controlled landing on a comet in history.

The anticipation of the complicated operation was great, and both

, the mother ship, and little

had already become icons of space exploration.

It did not go as expected.

After jumping from the ship, instead of landing at the assigned spot,

accidentally explored three points of

as this 4.5 billion-year-old comet was popularly nicknamed.

When the robot landed on the point selected for its landing, the Agilkia region, it was unable to anchor itself to the ground with its harpoons due to a technical problem;

it bounced off and began an unplanned two-hour flight during which it collided with the edge of a cliff and plunged elsewhere, which

Eventually, the robot ended up stopping forever in the Abydos region, as found out 22 months after the operation and shortly before the mission was successfully concluded, when the

spacecraft crashed in a planned and controlled way

on the comet's surface. .

The dark rift in which

ended up

did not allow sunlight to recharge its batteries as planned, so the robot turned off when it ran out of power and could not complete the scientific program they had designed for it.

But Laurence O'Rourke, one of the scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) who found the

of

, not stopped to also locate the place where the robot made an intermediate stop during his tour of

, a body which was born from the merger of two comets.

THAT

Ice from billions of years ago

After years of research, they have managed to find this point, as the scientists of the Rosetta mission detailed this Wednesday in an article published in the journal

.

It is a place where

left his footprints in the billions of years old

, thus revealing that

"Locating this landing site was important, because

sensors

indicated that it had penetrated the surface and that meant it would most likely have exposed the primitive ice below, allowing us to access billions of years old ice. antiquity, something priceless, "O'Rourke explained in an ESA press release.

The analysis of the data sent by

and

has allowed them to reconstruct what the rugged journey of the robot on the surface of this comet was like.

You know, for example, that he

, making at least four contacts as he crawled across the surface.

At one point, the robot sank into a crevice, at a depth of 25 centimeters, a movement that has left a striking mark.

Scientists have found two impressions made by the robot: one in ice and the other in dust.

A skull-shaped crest

The area of ​​that second landing has been called the

because seen from above it resembles a skull, as explained by O'Rourke.

Analysis of the images and data collected by the OSIRIS instruments and

VIRTIS spectrometer

confirmed that the 3.5 square meter bright area visible was water ice.

Although at the time of landing this ice was for the most part in the shade, the Sun was hitting it fully when the images were taken months later, illuminating them and making them stand out from the rest of the landscape, and facilitating their detection.

On the other hand, this research has allowed us to better understand what the ice of a comet is like.

As they explain in the

article

, this is the first

measurement

of the smoothness of the dust and ice interior of a rock in a comet.

That billion-year-old mix of dust and ice "is extraordinarily soft, fluffier than the foam of a cappuccino, a bubble bath or waves breaking on the shore," he compares.

Also, calculating the porosity of rocks helps them understand the hardness of a comet, valuable information for planning other landings on future missions.

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