The space probe Rosetta yesterday made a historic rendezvous with a comet, climaxing a 10-year, 6 billion kilometer chase through the solar system, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
“We’re at the comet,” Rosetta flight operations manager Sylvain Lodiot said in a Webcast from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.
It marks the first time a spacecraft has been sent into orbit around a comet, a wanderer of the solar system whose primeval dust and ice may hold insights into how the planets formed. In November, a robot scientific lab called Philae will be sent down to the surface to make the first-ever landing on a comet.
Photo: AFP
Rosetta’s rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was confirmed at 11:29am in Germany at a distance of 400 million kilometers from Earth, according to signals received at ground stations.
ESA director-general Jean-Jacques Dordain hailed the fruit of 20 years’ work to design, build and launch the three-tonne craft and then steer it to a tiny target in deep space.
“It makes 2014 the year of Rosetta,” Dordain said. “Rosetta is a unique mission, unique by its scientific goal. Understanding our origins is certainly the best way to understand our future.”
On its Twitter page, the Rosetta mission said: “Hello, comet!” in the languages of the agency’s 20 nations.
“It’s a historic meeting and a great first in world science, which the global space community has been awaiting for a decade,” said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of France’s National Center for Space Research, a major contributor to the ESA project.
The ESA showed a close-up picture of a gnarled, greyish object, comprising two lobes joined by a neck. The surface is pucked by what seems to be impact marks.
“Our first clear views of the comet have given us plenty to think about,” project scientist Matt Taylor said. “Is this double-lobed structure built from two separate comets that came together in the solar system’s history, or is it one comet that has eroded dramatically and asymmetrically over time?”
Launched in March 2004, Rosetta had to make four flybys of Mars and Earth, using their gravitational force as a slingshot to build up speed to catch up with its prey.
It then began a complex series of maneuvers to slow down to walking speed with the comet. If any one of those operations had failed, the probe would have gone whizzing past its target.
The final maneuver was a small firing of thrusters, lasting just 6 minutes, 26 seconds, the ESA said.
“This burn will tip Rosetta into the first leg of a series of three-legged triangular paths about the comet,” the ESA said.
The “pyramidal” track placed the craft at a height of about 100km above the comet, Lodiot said.
Rosetta will gradually reduce its height, entering gravitational orbit in September.
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