Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: ANYONE SEEN OUR COMET?

by Hazed

The scheduled rendezvous between NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 85P/Boethin has been cancelled because the comet has vanished!

Deep Impact was originally sent up to fire a probe into Comet Tempel-1 in 2005, in an attempt to deduce the body's composition. When it had finished with that task it set off for a late 2008 meeting with Boethin, a body which has been spotted only twice before, in 1975 and 1986. It was supposed to have showed up in 1997 but nobody saw it that time. In October last year, various telescopes were used to try to find it again but with no success. It's gone.

What happen to Boethin is a mystery. It's possible it may have broken up during its 1997 approach, but scientists think that's unlikely because it never approaches closer to the sun than the Earth's orbit. Michael A'Hearn of the University of Maryland in Baltimore, chief scientist for the Deep Impact mission, said: "Disappearing in the sense of breaking up and dissipating is actually very rare. If it disappeared, then that is fascinating in itself - only one other comet has done that in recent memory."

That other comet is Linear-S4 which fell apart and disappeared in 1990.

A'Hearn says it's more likely that Boethin "broke into a few large chunks that are still intact but have drifted too far from the original comet's orbit to have been spotted in searches to date."

Another plausible suggestion is that since Boethin has only been seen twice, scientists did not accurately predict its trajectory and therefore they've been looking in the wrong place!

Personally, I blame the Martians.

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