It is already December and everyone are busy either celebrating Christmas or waiting for new year parties. 2018 has been a wonderful year for me due to various reasons. This year started with very beautiful lunar eclipse with reddish moon in January and now is ending with a comet show. Perhaps a great year any astronomer would wish for.
So what exactly is a comet? Comet is nothing but an icy body which orbits our Sun in highly eccentric elliptical orbit and when it comes closer to our Sun during its journey , it warms up and begins to release gases which can be seen as tail.
A comet named 46P/Wirtanen was zooming through the inner solar system and made its closest approach to earth on Dec 16th,2018. People who were lucky enough to avoid clouds and light pollution were able to observe this from naked eye. Many of my friends captured some amazing pictures of this comet and also noticed the comet move in front of the stars from one night to the next.
Whenever I hear someone say comet, I always remember this space mission called Rosetta. Rosetta was a space probe built by the European Space Agency launched on 2 March 2004. It was a space probe which landed on a comet to study details of it. Can you imagine, when everyone was aiming for Mars, Moon etc., they managed to design and plan a landing on a comet. Really very smart and adventurous idea.
I know now you might think why studying about Comet is so important? Comets contain complex organic compounds. These are the elements that make up nucleic acids and amino acids, essential ingredients for life. Comets are thought to have delivered a vast quantity of water to Earth, and they may have also seeded Earth with organic molecules. Now you may see why Rosetta was a great mission.
Not only worldwide Scientists but I think every person on this Earth is curious about his/her existence and has thousands of questions on origin of life on Earth. And if there is any slightest chance that Comets might have answer for this, we should take every possible opportunity to make a detailed study about them and also because it is fun to study about them.
Architha's Cosmos 
The Rosetta Mission was originally scheduled to target this specific comet (Comet 47P). However due to a launch failure of the Ariane 5 launch vehicle back in 2002, There were reliability concerns about the LV and this forced the mission planners to reschedule.The launch window in 2004 permitted the alternate mission plan for Comet 67P. All i could think of when i spotted this comet was how amazing it would’ve been for Philae and Rosetta to hop a ride on this comet and be greeted by us on Earth :D.
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Oh cool, that would have been really nice to greet Rosetta along with this comet. Thankyou very much for the information, really interesting one.
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