Rotten eggs, horse urine, alcohol, and bitter almonds: this is the bouquet of odours you would smell if a comet in deep space could be brought back to Earth, European scientists say.
An instrument aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has detected some intriguing chemical signatures from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) since their rendezvous in deep space in August, the scientists said.
Molecules detected include ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulphide, hydrogen cyanide and formaldehyde.
"If you could smell the comet, you probably wish that you hadn't," said the team wryly in a blog posted on the European Space Agency (ESA) website.
The device, called Rosina-DFMS, is a mass spectrometer.
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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-2...n-eggs/5837806
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