Comets and Their Origin

The book is organized in two halves. Its opening four chapters give an overview of how comets form, surveying past comet missions, observing comets from a distance, astrochemistry, laboratory-made artificial comets, and chirality, the property of molecules that cannot be superimposed on their mirror images. The second half turns to Rosetta, the European mission to a comet. It traces the spacecraft's launch and long journey, its scientific goals and onboard instruments, and the planned landing on the comet's nucleus. Throughout, the author raises two large questions: where Earth's water came from, and how the chemical building blocks of life first appeared. He explains how instruments carried on a mission like Rosetta could help answer them. A closing chapter describes what researchers hoped to learn from Rosetta and how its findings might affect life on Earth. The volume is aimed at scientists and students from a range of disciplines who want the background needed to analyze Rosetta's data.