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).
Diagram of a comet showing the dust trail, the dust tail (or antitail) and the ion gas tail, which is formed by the solar wind flow. Gas and snow jets on Comet Hartley 2. In the outer Solar System, comets remain frozen and inactive and are extremely difficult or impossible to detect from Earth due to their small size.