What Does a Comet Smell Like?

ESA’s Rosetta mission is a remarkable achievement for space exploration, but many people would rather talk about one of the scientists, Dr Matt Taylor, who is being criticized for wearing a shirt featuring scantly clad women. Yet the women involved with the program receive little attention—women like German physicist Dr Kathrin Altwegg.

Rosetta space probe’s lander Philae is now dormant and resting on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko’s surface, but before the batteries went flat and put the plucky little lander to sleep, it managed to collect core samples and record data that was the ultimate goal of the 10+ year mission.

However, its job is not yet over. The lander is expected to wake up again sometime around August 2015, when the sun has a better angle for providing light.

One of the scientists involved with the project is Dr Kathrin Altwegg, professor for The Space Research & Planetary Sciences Division at the University of Bern. She is the reason why we now know what the comet smells like. According to her “The perfume of 67P/C-G is quite strong, with the odour of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), horse stable (ammonia) and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde.”

“Add some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture, paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulfur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulfide, and you arrive at the ‘perfume’ of our comet.”

She is chief scientist in charge of Rosina-DFMS, a device known as a spectrometer on board Rosetta, which can analyze the gasses emitted from the comet and determine their chemical consistency. That data can tell us what the comet smells like.

“It’s really fabulous. You wait 10 years and all of a sudden it’s there… What’s surprising is we already have extremely rich chemistry at this distance from the sun.”

As the comet gets closer to the sun, it starts warming up and more of the gasses escape from within its surface, forming what has been inspiring and terrifying humans since ancient times — the comet’s tail.

But this is not Dr Altwegg’s only accomplishment. She has authored numerous scientific papers and written several books about comets and physics.

When she was young, her parents encouraged her to become an archaeologist. She learned Greek and Latin, in addition to Hebrew. But after graduating high school she later decided it was physics that interested her.

“Archaeology can also be practiced as a hobby, I thought to myself. With physics it’s not possible.”

In addition to being the head of the Rosina project, she worked on the Giotto project, which was a spacecraft that flew by Halley’s Comet in 1986, at a distance of 596km. The program told us much about the material that forms the comet.

Her current team consists mostly of women, which is rare in the field of physics. When she studied at the University of Basel, she was the only woman there studying physics. She earned her doctorate in 1980.

In her institute, where she works, only 10 to 15 percent of the students are women. “That’s not a large bunch,” says Altwegg, but she is constantly working to increase the proportion of women in scientific research. As a member of the university’s office for Gender Equality, she organizes information days that promote STEM careers for high school girls. “It’s about taking away the fear of technology and science.”

Even her two daughters have followed in Kathrin’s footsteps–one is a mathematician, the other a materials scientist. The advice she offers is “Parents need to help their daughters from an early age, to build self-confidence.”

src: Neue Zürcher Zeitung