From Nasa
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...comet_ice.html
"Tempel 1 has a surface area of roughly 45 square miles, or 1.2 billion square feet. The area taken up by the water ice, however, is only 300,000 square feet. The rest of the comet surface is dust."
thats 0.025%!!! is surface water-ice..... and we still wanna call it a snowball? pfff
the headline should be... "it's 99.975% Not Ice!".... seriously... who writes these headlines?
and more recently from
NASA October 29, 2009
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news116.html
But the biggest surprise discovered during the flyby came with the comet images (72 taken during the pass). The camera team, led by JPL's
longtime comet expert, Ray Newburn,
had expected that the comet would be a rather bland object looking somewhat like a black potato. What we saw, even in the very first picture sent back, was quite dramatic. We saw kilometer-sized deep holes bounded by
vertical and even overhanging cliffs; flat topped hills surrounded by cliffs; spiky pinnacles hundreds of meters tall, pointed skyward: in addition to the numerous jets of dust and gas escaping into space. Two of the dust jets came from the comet's night side, a region that was expected to be inactive because if its lack of heating by sunlight.
and the clincher...
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/photo/cometwild2.html
check out those photos...
Quote:
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golly gosh...they look a lot like balls of ice
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sorry mate thats not a snow ball... It's a new surface... sharp.. hundred-meter-spikes... it's not a nice round melting ball.
I was taught in school / uni that these comets are snowballs... all the books have them pictured as that... These photos do not match up with all the books.... granted the drawings and theories were constructed before we had space probes taking up close photos of these objects...
The ice model needs some serious updating me (and nasa) reckons...
the links are there gents... go for it... it's not made up... however it IS exciting and new... these are very exciting objects.... that do differ from expectations!