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SPACE & COSMOS | NYT NOW
European Spacecraft Pulls Alongside Comet After
10 Years and Four Billion Miles
By KENNETH CHANG AUG. 6, 2014
After 10 years and a journey of four billion miles, the European Space
Agencys Rosetta spacecraft arrived at its destination on Wednesday for
the first extended, close examination of a comet.
A six-minute thruster firing at 5 a.m. Eastern time, the last in a series
of 10 over the past few months, slowed Rosetta to the pace of a person
walking, about two miles per hour relative to the speed of its target, Comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
It is like driving a car or a bus on a motorway for 10 years, said
Andrea Accomazzo, the flight director, at a post-rendezvous news
conference. Now weve entered downtown. Were downtown and we have
to start orienting ourselves. We dont know the town yet, so we have to
discover it first.
Over the coming months, Rosetta and its comet, called C-G for short,
will plunge together toward the sun.
In November, a small 220-pound lander is to leave the spacecraft, set
down on the comet and harpoon itself to the surface, the first time a
spacecraft will gently land on a comet.
At this point, the comet and its shadowing spacecraft are more than
330 million miles from the sun (more than three times as far out as Earth),
traveling at 35,000 miles per hour. With the final firing of the thruster,
Rosetta was a mere 60 miles from the comets surface.
This morning, we hit a milestone, an important milestone of this
mission, said Laurence ORourke, a member of its science team.
But this mission isnt just about arriving at a comet, he went on. Its
about studying the comet. Its about placing a lander on a comet, but
again, the mission does not end there. The science continues. Were trying
to follow this comet all around its orbit.
Launched in March 2004, Rosetta a boxy structure roughly nine by
seven feet, powered by two 47-foot-long solar panels followed a
circuitous route through the solar system, using flybys of the Earth and
Mars to fling itself into the same orbital path as Comet C-G.
It is still not close enough to be captured by the comets gravity, but
instead will be flying a triangular path in front of the comet as it maps the
surface. It will eventually move within 6.2 miles of the surface and enter
orbit around the comet.
Comets, made of ice, dust and rock, are frozen leftovers from the
formation of the solar system. Rosetta is named after the Rosetta Stone,
the engraved block that was crucial in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics,
and scientists hope the spacecrafts observations will offer important clues
to how the solar system came together 4.5 billion years ago.
Photographs have revealed a surprisingly irregular shape for the two-
and-a-half-mile-wide comet, possibly an amalgamation of two icy bodies
or a result of uneven weathering during previous trips to the inner solar
system. From a distance, the blurry blob looked something like a rubber
duck; as it came into focus, it began to bear a closer resemblance to a knob
of ginger flying through space.
At the news conference, Holger Sierks, principal investigator for
Rosettas high-resolution camera, revealed the latest images, pointing to
cliffs, deep shadows and also flat areas with boulders sitting on the
surface. Well learn in the coming months what this is telling us, he said.
The spacecraft had earlier measured the flow of water vapor
streaming off the comet at a rate of about two cups a second, which would
fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in about 100 days. As the comet
accelerates toward the sun, its surface will warm, and the trickle will grow
to a torrent a hundred or a thousand times that size, contributing to the
long tail that is characteristic of comets.
An unsolved mystery of Earth is where the water in the oceans came
from; some suggest it came from comets. The water in comets from the
distant Oort Cloud, far beyond Pluto, does not match the water on Earth,
but the water in nearer comets may.
C-G is one of the nearer comets: Its orbit extends not far beyond
Jupiter. Scientists should now be able to get a better idea of its
composition by measuring temperatures at its surface and a few inches
below, and in the gases streaming off the comet, along with the weight of
water molecules streaming off it.
Much of the work in the next three months is to find a safe place for
the lander, Philae, to set down. Once released from Rosetta, the lander will
be pulled down by the comets gravity and will strike its surface at a couple
of miles per hour, like someone walking into a wall. Its hurting, but it
doesnt kill you, said Stephan Ulamec, head of the consortium that built
the lander.
The harpoons and a thruster will help keep it from bouncing off,
though Dr. Ulamec said recent photographs suggested a dusty surface
more like cigarette ash or newly fallen snow than ice. But actually, we do
not know it yet, he said. We will only find out when we land there.
Designed to operate through 2015, Rosetta and Philae will make
observations as the comet makes its nearest approach to the sun a little
more than a year from now, at 115 million miles, still outside the orbit of
Earth. The comet will remain too dim to be seen by the naked eye.
A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2014, on page A8 of the New York edition with
the headline: European Spacecraft Pulls Alongside Comet After 10 Years and Four Billion Miles.
2014 The New York Times Company