Mission scientist reacts to historic first images from the surface of a comet

The sharp-eyed science camera on Europe’s Rosetta comet orbiter caught a view of the probe’s fuzzy shadow when controllers guided the spacecraft just a few miles over its subject’s nucleus last month.

A flotilla of spacecraft orbiting Mars will be turning their instruments in two directions – one towards Comet Siding Spring, and the other towards Mars itself, to find out what happens when a planetary atmosphere brushes against the fuzzy atmosphere of a comet.

If it were possible to breath in space, one would smell a pungent aroma of rotten eggs, ammonia, vinegary sulphur dioxide and toxic hydrogen cyanide coming from comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, according to sensors on the Rosetta mission.