Comet researchers meet at TU Vienna

From October 24-26, 2011, a group of 15 comet researchers from Germany, France, Finland and Austria met at the Institute of Chemical Engineering, TU Vienna. On 2 March 2004 the European Space Agency launched the space mission Rosetta; it will reach the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in May 2014. Rosetta will enter into an orbit around the comet, and release a small "lander" unit to land softly on the comet surface. The instruments on the Rosetta "orbiter" will investigate the comet from some distance and will collect and analyze cometary dust. One of the orbiter's instruments is "COSIMA", a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer (TOF-SIMS). The COSIMA project is under the guidance of the Max-Planck-Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and involves several research groups from Europe. TU Vienna contributed methods for data analysis as well as software (Kurt Varmuza and collaborators, Institute of Chemical Engineering, research group Thermal Engineering and Simulation).