Scientists have long desired to learn more about the cosmos, and many initiatives have been initiated throughout the years to examine celestial entities with tremendous precession.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved a new mission called ‘Comet Inspector,’ which will add another key chapter to that quest. According to the European Space Agency, it is scheduled to launch in 2028 with a new telescope called Ariel, which will be used to explore exoplanets.
The telescope will be stationed to keep an eye on any incoming comets, despite the fact that the initiative has no specified aim.
‘We’re taking a big risk here. But it’s a big payoff,’ ESA’s director of science, Günther Hasinger, said in an official statement on the project, which was first suggested in 2019.
The ‘Comet Inspector’ will also assist the ESA in finding planets with potentially habitable atmospheres. This will also assist scientists in detecting any comets or asteroid-like bodies that may be heading near Earth.
Previous missions, such as the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, have visited comets with brief periods of time, but this will allow them to study them over a much longer amount of time.
According to an article in Natural magazine, Alan Fitzsimmons, a comet researcher from Queen’s University Belfast, ‘Comet Interceptor is going to give us a first actual view of a primordial body.’
‘We have no notion how it will appear. That will be absolutely groundbreaking, never-before-seen science,’ he continued.
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