In response to some of the comments above, I'll note the following;
the comet shows no rock-like properties when compared to asteroids (i.e. rocks) that were also scanned by MIRO:
MILLIMETER AND SUBMILLIMETER OBSERVATIONS OF ASTEROIDS FROM THE ROSETTA SPACECRAFT
Hofstadter, M., et al, 2012
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012DPS....4410201H
Millimeter and submillimeter measurements of asteroid (2867) Steins during the Rosetta fly-by.
Gulkis, S., et al, 2010
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063310000553 (paywalled)
It should also be noted that despite finding ice beneath the surface of 67P, MIRO failed to find it at either asteroid. It should be further noted that the mass and density of Lutetia was measured by Rosetta, and was found to be what one would expect for an asteroid (i.e. a rock):
Asteroid 21 Lutetia: Low Mass, High Density.
Pätzold, M., et al, 2011
http://scripts.mit.edu/~paleomag/articles/Paetzold_2011_Science.pdf (conference poster)
As regards the obviously low density of comets, and the hard layer encountered by MUPUS;
Furthermore, the evolution of the structure and physical properties of the analogue samples during sublimation also provides interesting clues to understand the surface of cometary nucleus, TNOs or icy satellites. Ice–tholins samples placed under simulated comet surface conditions acquire a vertical stratification with an uppermost porous mantle of refractory tholins overlaying a layer of hard ice formed by re-condensation/sintering under the mantle.
And;
The hardening of the ice below the sublimation mantle, as observed in laboratory experiments, also provides a plausible mechanism to explain the observation of brittle mechanical behavior of some regions on the surface of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
From:
Sublimation of ice–tholins mixtures: A morphological and spectrophotometric study.
Poch, O., et al, 2016
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103515005163 (paywalled)
See also:
Sublimation of water ice mixed with silicates and tholins: Evolution of surface texture and reflectance spectra, with implications for comets.
Poch, O., et al, 2016
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103515005709 (paywalled)
Then we would also have to ask (again) why did the impact into Tempel 1 make such a large crater? And why did it eject a lot of solid ice? Strange thing to happen if you are impacting rock. And why is the density of comets so low? I recall some EU nonsense about repulsion due to the charge on the comet affecting the measurements! Strange how the Rosetta team were so successful in orbiting the comet in bound orbits, when the charge on the spacecraft was regularly changing. Surely the repulsion would therefore also vary, and Rosetta would have been all over the place!
As for the asteroid Psyche, it is nothing like a comet! It has a density between ~3.3 - ~6.7 g/cm^3. 67P is ~0.5 g/cm^3! It likely got the water/OH from collisions with smaller objects, as the article Sol quoted went on to say. He seems to have missed that bit out.
So, I'll say what JT said further up the thread - pretty much everything predicted by David Talbott was wrong. This is hardly surprising, coming from someone who co-authored a poster to a 2006 IEEE conference (allegedly), in which it was claimed that the water found at comets was OH, and that it was misinterpreted by scientists as being H2O! This despite more than 20 unambiguous detections between 1986 & 2006. Around a dozen of those came from the ODIN satellite, summarised in this paper:
Submillimetre observations of comets with Odin: 2001–2005
Biver, N., et al, 2007
https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0610779.pdf
The results for most, or all of those comets, were in the public domain by the time T & T wrote their mythology inspired fiction. There were others, notably from Halley and Tempel 1, as well as some detected by the NIRSPEC instrument at the Keck telescope.
Then, of course, there is their mechanism for creating the water. Via the solar wind. Shown many times to be impossible. First of all, the solar wind ions are travelling too quickly to combine with anything in the coma. And if they manage to reach the surface, there are many orders of magnitude too few of them to somehow create even 1 litre of H2O per second. And, of course, we had about 7 or 8 months where the solar wind was getting nowhere near the comet.
And regarding the porosity, we are not talking about dirty great voids in the comet! It is rather the porosity of the dust itself, as well as the material not being highly compacted. Some of the latest work on the CONSERT data is here:
A porosity gradient in 67P/C-G nucleus suggested from CONSERT and SESAME-PP results: an interpretation based on new laboratory permittivity measurements of porous icy analogues.
Brouet, Y., et al, 2016
http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/462/Suppl_1/S89.full.pdf+html
In the last paragraph of that paper, the authors note that;
The presence of a hard icy layer in the near-surface of the nucleus at Philae’s location, which could have been formed by successive episodes of sublimation/recondensation and/or sintering, is supported by this work. This layer contrasts with the high porosity of the material in depth in the small lobe of the nucleus inferred from CONSERT results
.
All in all, I'm surprised any EU supporter would want to resurrect this thread, given that their comet model has been a total and utter failure. All predictions wrong, and not a single piece of evidence in favour of any of it, after over two years of in-situ observations. One would be hard pressed to imagine how it could have possibly gone more badly for them!
If anybody wants any of the paywalled papers above, send me a pm.