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Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

Comets Stink! The Chemical Zoo Found at Comet Chury

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Technology, Science

4.81.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 August 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Scientists have found a menagerie of complex organic compounds on the comet visited by the Rosetta spacecraft that connect it with the birth of our solar system.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Comets stink! This week on Planetary Radio.

0:10.0

Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

0:17.0

Okay, we only know that one comet stinks, but that's probably because we haven't sniffed others.

0:24.0

As the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe, sniffed Comet 67P Choriumov-Gerosimenko, hereafter referred to as Churri.

0:35.0

To be precise, it was an exquisitely precise instrument on Rosetta that did the smelling.

0:41.0

Today, we'll meet three members of the team that have spent years analyzing the data from that instrument called Rosina to identify a surprisingly diverse collection of complex compounds.

0:53.0

Their findings have just been published in Nature Communications. They may tell us something about the origin of our solar system and of life itself.

1:02.0

Bruce Bats has also caught the scent he'll add to the commentary commentary when we reach this week's What's Up segment.

1:10.0

The August 5 edition of the Downlink, our free weekly newsletter, celebrated the 10th anniversary of Curiosity, the more science laboratory rover on Mars.

1:22.0

That nice selfie was taken last November. I was standing in a room with thousands of screaming fans when we got word a decade ago that she had safely touched down.

1:32.0

That planet-fast celebration was one of the greatest days of my life.

1:37.0

Curiosity is still rolling, still exploring, still doing great science.

1:42.0

NASA and ESA chose this anniversary to announce that samples of Mars now being collected by Curiosity's sister, Perseverance, will reach Earth by 2033.

1:55.0

You can read the details at planetary.org slash downlink.

1:59.0

As you may have heard from Casey Dreyer during last week's planetary radio space policy edition, our monthly companion podcast,

2:07.0

the US Senate's 2023 NASA budget looks good for explorers like you and me.

2:13.0

Among other things, it restores full funding for the Neo-Surveyor mission.

2:18.0

And the JDB-ST may have already broken its own record for detection of the oldest galaxy found so far.

2:26.0

This one is 13.5 billion light years from us. That's less than a quarter of a billion years after the Big Bang.

2:35.0

Posing for effect here.

2:38.0

Norahani is a chemist and postdoctoral researcher at the Physics Institute of the University of Bern in Switzerland.

2:46.0

She is lead author of the Nature Communications Paper titled Identification and Characterization of a new ensemble of cometary organic molecules.

...

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