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NASA Space Earth Science Technology

Rosetta's 12-Year Mission Ends With Landing On Comet (sciencemag.org) 40

sciencehabit writes: It was an unusual grand finale. The crowded European Space Agency (ESA) operations center in Darmstadt, Germany, waited in silence and then the signal from the descending Rosetta mission simply stopped at 1.19 pm local time showing that the spacecraft had, presumably, landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko some 40 minutes earlier, due to the time the signal takes to reach Earth. Mission controllers hugged each other; there was gentle applause from onlookers; and that was it. There were no last minute crises. Seven of Rosetta's instruments kept gathering data until the end. Holger Sierks, principal investigator of the 12-year mission's main camera, showed the gathered staff, officials, and journalists Rosetta's final picture: a rough gravelly surface with a few larger rocks covering an area 10 meters across. Earlier, it had snapped the interior of deep pits on the comet (shown above, from an altitude of 5.8 kilometers) that may show the building blocks it is made of. "It's very crude raw data but this will keep us busy," Sierks said. It is hoped that this last close-up data grab will help to clarify the many scientific questions raised by Rosetta.
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Rosetta's 12-Year Mission Ends With Landing On Comet

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 01, 2016 @02:13AM (#52993319)

    The spacecraft's final transmission : "I wonder if it'll be friends with me"

  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Saturday October 01, 2016 @02:39AM (#52993355)

    Earlier, it had snapped the interior of deep pits on the comet (shown above, from an altitude of 5.8 kilometers) that may show the building blocks it is made of.

    It it too much to ask submissions be re-written to a point and not just blatant copying and pasting from the source?

    • It it too much to ask submissions be re-written to a point and not just blatant copying and pasting from the source?

      What, you don't see the pictures?

  • Although the scientific outcome of the mission is not obviously consequent, the whole operation is a great achievement.
  • "Landing" is a rather positive spin for what was an intentional crash. Rosetta slammed into the comet's surface, hardly anything I'd call a "landing".
    • It "slammed" into the comet at 1 m/s or about 2 mph (not from the linked article, I read that somewhere else). Quite unlikely that it left much of a dent, and some ESA guy even said it might have bounced back and now floats alongside the comet.
      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Even though we say that projectiles land, I think that when we use the word "land" for any controlled craft, we mean that it alighted and came to rest in a controlled manner - otherwise we tend to use the word "crash".

        Using "landing" for a deliberate crash seems somewhat wrong to my language ear, much like saying a car parked in a brick wall, or a boat beached at the sea bottom.

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in which there is absolutely nothing. -- Descartes

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