Finally we have some serious articles getting started in the press about the Rosetta mission to the unpronounceable Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The first article focussing on the next phase of the Rosetta mission is by Jonathan Amos for the BBC and is available here, but I was also interviewed a few weeks ago for a Telegraph article which should appear soon. As the BBC article points out, it’s a good time for comets and we’re going to be hearing a lot about them what with Comet ISON happening soon too. I’ll blog about that in due course but from what I hear from my astronomy buddies, things are looking quite good for ISON at the moment.
Rosetta is a mission that has been travelling through space for nearly 10 years and the spacecraft even entered into hiberation in 2011 to save its precious battery power. It’s passed two asteroids during its journey – 2867 Steins (in 2008) and 21 Lutetia (in 2010) – and is set to land on the comet in November 2014. It’s first big step is waking up from its 2 year slumber and this is set to happen on January 20th 2014. It will then approach the comet in August 2014 before the Philae lander makes its landing attempt. This is the first time in history that any space agency has tried to land on a comet so it’s a really exciting test of the technologies required to do this. Once (hopefully) it’s safely harpooned on the comet surface Rosetta will carry out scientific experiments to find out what the comet is made of. As we all know (or those of you who read my blog anyway), comets contain the original building blocks of the Solar System, having preserved the earliest materials from the beginning of the Solar System in the deep freeze far from the Sun. We don’t often get to sample them so not only will Rosetta show us how to capture a comet, but it will also be able to reveal 4.6 billion year old Solar System secrets.
Here’s a video made by ESA showing an orbit around the comet. There’s more video’s and content about Rosetta available here.
Oh, and even more excitingly, the Open University have an instrument, called Ptolemy, on the Philae Lander. We’re hoping to measure the isotopic composition of the water and organic material in the comet. However, building space instruments to survive and work in these extreme conditions is no mean feat so fingers crossed Ptolemy performs and we can get some real science back. I will be using the new data to compare to the analyses of comet dust that I make on Earth as Rosetta will provide us with the ‘ground truth’ to understand what a real comet looks like in space. I can’t wait!!
I recorded an interview for the Guardian Science Weekly podcast with the Ptolemy engineers at the The Open University. That should be available soon so I’ll post it on here when it’s ready.