Recently Rosetta spacecraft became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet

Euro spacecraft Rosetta prepares to land on icy comet after 250 million mile journey.

After a 10-year chase taking it billions of miles across the solar system, the Rosetta spacecraft made history on 6^th august as it became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet on its journey around the sun.

“We’re at the comet,” Rosetta’s flight operations manager, Sylvain Lodiot, declared in a webcast from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.

“After 10 years, five months and four days travelling toward our destination, looping around the Sun five times and clocking up 6.4 billion kilometers, we are delighted to announce finally ‘we are here’,” ESA‘s director general Jean-Jacques Dordain announced.

“Europe’s Rosetta is now the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet, a major highlight in exploring our origins. Discoveries can start.”

Some facts about the mission and Rosetta:

*Total cost of the mission is said to be 1.3bn euros

*Paris-based Esa is preparing for Rosetta’s arrival at its target on Wednesday

*It has released images showing the comet’s surface in unprecedented detail

*Images confirm ‘rubber duck’ shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

*They were taken from a distance of just 620 miles (1,000 km) away

*Publication of images follows controversy over Esa’s release policy

*One science writer had compared Esa’s refusal to make images and data publicly available to not showing the World Cup live on TV

*But a compromise has been reached with Esa releasing an image a day

*The probe weighed in at 3,000kg at liftoff back in 2004, with over half of that made up of propellant

*It has two 14m long solar panels to provide electrical power

• The orbiter carries 11 experiments
  


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  The lander, Philae, carries nine experiments including a drill to sample beneath the surface

  
  

Starting now, Rosetta is no longer chasing a comet, it is traveling along with it.

 

“We have been approaching 67P for such a long time, it is almost surreal to now actually be there,” Holger Sierks of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in a statement. “Today, we are opening a new chapter of the Rosetta mission. And already we know that it will revolutionize cometary science.”

Rosetta and its comet are currently out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, about 250 million miles from Earth. Together at last, they are hurtling through space at 34,000 mph along one stretch of 67P’s 6.5 year orbit around the sun.

Rosetta has flown a long way to get to this moment. It blasted off from Earth in March 2004, and has followed a convoluted and looping path through the solar system before finally meeting up with the comet 10 years later. Along the way, it picked up three gravity assists from the Earth, one from Mars, and passed through the asteroid belt twice. All told, the spacecraft has flown 4 billion miles so far. And yet, in some ways, its work has just begun.

Other spacecraft have made comet flybys in the past, but a mere flyby is not what Rosetta is after. The ambitious mission first concocted in the 1970s and approved in 1993, entails not only escorting the comet along part of its orbit, but actually landing on it as well. To that end, Rosetta is carrying a lander called Philae that the ESA hopes to send down to the comet’s surface in November.

“Arriving at the comet is really only just the beginning of an even bigger adventure, with greater challenges still to come as we learn how to operate in this unchartered environment, start to orbit and, eventually, land,” said Sylvain Lodiot, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft operations manager in a statement.

As Rosetta got closer to the comet in the first days of August, it sent back intriguing images of the comet’s bizarre landscape.

“It’s incredible how full of variation this surface is,” Sierks said. “We have never seen anything like this before in such detail.”

Rosetta is currently maintaining a distance of about 60 miles from the comet, but in the coming weeks and months it will trim that orbit down to 30 miles, and then to 18 miles. As it flies closer, the spacecraft will continue to gather more information about the comet’s surface, as well as scout potential sites for Philae to land.

After Philae begins its work on the comet’s surface, Rosetta will continue to tag along with 67P until the end of December 2015. Using its suite of instruments, the spacecraft will measure how the comet changes as it nears the sun, and what gases it will expel from its icy nucleus, and at what rate.

Ultimately, scientists hope that by studying the comet, they may learn more about the building blocks of the solar system, and whether bodies like this were responsible for bringing water and complex molecules to Earth.

Recently Rosetta spacecraft became the first probe to rendezvous with a comet