That prospect turned me into a serious shopper for trip cancellation and interruption insurance (one policy usually covers both), a product I had always dismissed as a rip-off. Like other value-oriented consumers, I had seen no need to add several hundred dollarsâ worth of vacation insurance to the price of a vacation. Until that trip. Since then we have insured a couple of other trips, but never needed to make a claim. The only time we came close was in the wake of 9/11.
What is a Comet? A comet is a very small solar system body made mostly of ices mixed with smaller amounts of dust and rock. Most comets are no larger than a few kilometres across. The main body of the comet is called the nucleus, and it can contain water, methane, nitrogen and other ices. When a comet is heated by the Sun, its ices begin to sublimate (similar to the way dry ice âfizzesâ when you leave it in sunlight).
Comets come from two major areas of our solar system: the Kuiper (pronounced KY-per) Belt and the Oort (pronounced OR-t) Cloud.Each of these regions contains billions of comets, but they have so much room in these vast rooms of space that they get no closer to each other than we on Earth do to the sun.here are other comets from the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud that are corraled by Jupiterâs massive gravity into its planetary family. These comets develop very short solar orbits-from three to 20 years.