Looks like the peanut-shaped comet named Hartley 2, which was written about by the New York Times two weeks ago, has been displaying some interesting behavior. The first sentence/paragraph reads, “A peanut-shaped comet was spewing out hundreds of tons of fluffy ice chunks a second as a NASA spacecraft swung by it two weeks ago.” Unfortunately, that one sentence is pretty much the entire article.
Kenneth Chang, a good writer, is cursed here with a particularly uninteresting story. He attempts to make it more appealing to readers by calling it “peanut-shaped” and noting in the second paragraph that a Brown University professor called it a “snow globe that you’ve simply just shaken.” But the story falls short after that. There’s just not enough substance. The finding that supposedly “fascinated the mission scientists” was that the ice chunks seemed to be ejected off the surface of the comet by jets of carbon dioxide: “This was the first time that such carbon dioxide jets had been observed at a comet.” But the average reader won’t find that too phenomenal. Chang delves into the science behind the ice chunks and continues to include quotations from scientists who talk colorfully about the discovery, but on the whole he leaves the reader with little reason to care for such news.
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