We got a large content of hydrogen, which is a typical cosmic element. Then we got quite large amounts of carbon dioxide which in its frozen state seems to make up the heads of comets. We also got a certain quantity of hydro-carbons and methane. This too is very characteristic of the front parts of comets. Professor Alexander Dolgov
Mabus then will soon die, there will come
Of people and beasts a horrible rout:
Then suddenly one will see vengeance,
Hundred, hand, thirst, hunger when the comet will run. Nostradamus II:62
The dart from the sky will make its extension,
Deaths speaking: great execution.
The stone in the tree, the proud nation restored,
Noise, human monster, purge expiation. Nostradamus II:70
Meteor showers are one of the most spectacular events in the night sky. And the reason is because the Earth actually goes through the tail of a comet. A comet is like a litter-bug. It has a tremendously long tail containing debris of ice crystals and rock and dust, and as the Earth goes through this trail of debris we see literally hundreds of shooting stars throughout the night sky. Professor Michio Kaku, interview Cosmic Collisions: Earth
Like a moth to a flame the comet was pulled into the planet. Pieces of a six-mile-wide flying ice mountain – the world watched. Ground-based telescopes caught the flash from the initial fireballs as the comet pieces detonated in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Solar Empire: Impact! Discovery 1997
Comet caching material: it’s made of the same chemical as glass – silicon dioxide – only a thousand times less dense. Birth of the Solar System, 2007
Three hundred and twenty million miles from Earth a spacecraft is about to attempt the impossible. Rosetta is going to catch a comet and send a lander on to its surface. The comet is travelling at forty one thousand miles per hour. Rosetta: Comet Landing, National Geographic 2014
What are comets made of? What can they tell us about how our solar system evolved. And most importantly, do they contain the essential elements of life? ibid.
Rosetta flies to within twenty miles of the comet's surface. ibid.
Seven hours later at 16:03 GMT Philae successfully touched down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. ibid. caption
For centuries they appeared without warning. Blazing across the night sky ... There is far more to comets than we thought. Strip the Cosmos s1e5: Hunting a Comet, Science 2014
They are fragile clumps of ice and rock. ibid.
Comets can lose their plasma tail. ibid.
At first it had been an almost telescopic speck; it had brightened to the dimensions of the greatest star in the heavens; it had still grown, hour by hour, in its incredibly swift, its noiseless and inevitable rush upon our earth, until it had equalled and surpassed the moon. Now it was the most splendid thing this sky of earth has ever held. I have never seen a photograph that gave a proper idea of it. Never at any time did it assume the conventional tailed outline, comets are supposed to have. H G Wells, In the Days of the Comet
A comet wrecked Britain in the year 562. Richard D Hall, Richplanet TV, Alan Wilson forensic historian
Beyond the Kuiper Belt, far beyond ... is the Oort cloud. An enormous swarm of perhaps trillions of icy bodies - the comets – which are left over from the earliest days of the solar system. David J Helfand, Quest University Canada
Comets were portents of doom. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey III: When Knowledge Conquered Fear, Fox 2014
A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets. ibid. Edmund Halley
‘This team has just purposely crashed a spacecraft called Rosetta into the surface of a comet.’ Comet Crash: Rosetta, news report, Science 2016
Its target is Comet 67P, one of the oldest relics in the solar system ... travels every six and a half years round the sun. ibid.
Rosetta endures a ten-year journey. ibid.
A massive achievement in space exploration: this team has just purposely crashed a spacecraft called Rosetta into the surface of a comet. Death on a Comet: The Rosetta Mission, flight director’s news report, Science 2019
A team desperate to catch a comet … Rosetta: a spacecraft engineered to do what no other has: to chase, track and survive the assaults of an angry comet. It’s target is Comet 67B, one of the oldest relics in the solar system … It has a lander that will deploy and dig into its surface. ibid.
Comets are the most primitive objects we can study. What is say the source of this wonderful display in the sky? Secrets of the Solar System V: Asteroids & Comets, Gerhard Schwehm, Rosetta mission manager, Yesterday 2020