Scientists tracking and recording the movements of Europa's first probe to land on a comet, Philae Missionς Rosetta announced today that the comet of the project has no magnetic field!
The news is of course the comet, 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and can provide some basic information for the formation of celestial bodies such as comets and planets – in the early stages of their development.
Ο Philae is a washing machine-sized device that detached from the Rosetta mothership and landed on the comet. He has been collecting ever since data (since last November). So the scientists, studying this data, found that the surface is not magnetized, as stated in a report by the European Space Agency (ESA), first published by Science magazine and presented at the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.
Recall that the probe's landing was not smooth, and it took four attempts (three bounces) to arrive at the current landing site. The complexity of the landing helped her team to discover that the comet had no magnetized core.
But the understanding of this "detail" came later when the team was able to compare measurements from different points of contact along the comet's surface.
Matthew Taylor, scientist at ESA's Rosetta project, told Nature. "The fact that Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko has no magnetic field could help us solve the puzzle of the creation of the planets and how it evolved from the first planetary disk."
Philae is currently in hibernation to maintain the battery, but can be rebooted from the end of May. This means that communication could be restored perhaps by the end of June.