Rosetta is a European Space Agency (ESA) cornerstone mission that entered orbit around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014 and will escort the comet for a 1.5 year nominal mission offering the most detailed study of a comet ever undertaken by humankind. The Rosetta orbiter has 11 scientific instruments (4 remote sensing) and the Philae lander to make complementary measurements of...

Claudia Regina Bonini-Domingos Comet Assay is a technique which can detect single-strand breaks as initial DNA damage.(1,2) Cells submitted to electrophoresis under alkaline conditions in low melting point agarose gel show DNA damage in a comet-like form when viewed at fluorescence microscopy. The lesion from each cell is quantified according to the comet tail length as class 0, 1, 2 or 3.(3) I...

Narrowband filter photometry was performed on the Rosetta spacecraft target, comet 46P/Wirtanen, at Lowell Observatory in 1991 and 1997. Production rates were determined for OH, NH, CN, C 3 , and C 2 , along with a measure of the dust production, A(θ)fρ. Relative abundances were computed, and a comparison to other comets indicates that this comet has a " typical " composition and a very low dus...