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).
The tail always points away from the sun. Artists concept of the stardust spacecraft flying throug the gas and dust from comet Wild 2. Credit: NASA/JPL. In order to understand what are comets made of, we need to break down the three main parts of the comet: the nucleus, coma, and tail.Comet nuclei are known to range from about 100 meters to more than 40 kilometers across.hey are composed of rock, dust, ice and frozen gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. Sometimes called dirty snowballs, recent studies have shown that the ice of a comet is covered by a crust.