ESA's Rosetta Spacecraft Set to Drop Anchor on Comet Today
Today the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will deploy its comet lander Philae, which will touch down on the surface of comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It will be the first time in history that a spacecraft has attempted a soft landing on a comet. Rosetta was launched on March 2, 2004 by an Ariane-5 G+ from ESA's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana and has traveled for over ten years to reach its destination. To rendezvous with Comet 67P, Rosetta performed four gravity assist manoeuvres -- three around Earth (March 2005, November 2007, and November 2009) and one around Mars (February 2007). It has been a long and remarkable trip.
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For those interested in what might have happened....from an inside source:<br><br>> I think the harpoons did not fire. Dominique, who participated in a number of lander meetings told me, that they just recently made a TV-test of the harpoons and realized that they do not work in vacuum. So, a thermal vacuum test was not made with the harpoons before.<br>><br>> Therefore the lander disappeared again from the surface. Mupus measured quite large temperature changes/fluctuations after landing. Also the VHF connection was unstable. This points into the direction, that the lander jumped up and then rotated. Another explanation would be that it jumped up and is oscillating, so that the VHF beam (with a widths of about 45 degrees) is not always hitting the satellite. At the end the lander seems to have landed again and at least for some time was stable. Then Rosetta disappeared behind the horizon.<br>Osiris tried to trace the landing, however on the one hand the pictures were overexposed, on the other hand the Satellite was not pointing into the correct direction. Now they are doing raster scans. I think tomorrow it will get much more interesting than today.
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