Comet Made of Rock

Comets are usually made of dust. However, comet Wild 2 has been found to consist of hard rocky material, like the material that makes up asteroids.

Hope Ishii and her team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have analysed fragments from Wild 2 that were captured by NASA’s Stardust mission in 2004. They have found that Wild 2 is made up of rock, like an asteroid. However, Ishii says that Wild 2 should still be considered a comet because it gives off dust and gas as the ice on its surface evaporates, which an asteroid does not do.

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