Rosetta reaches final destination after 10-year comet chase

Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General, speaks at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany during a presentation of the arrival of ESA’s space probe Rosetta at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Simon Bierwald / European Space Agency / AFP PhotoShow less

LONDON // Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft reached its final destination today after a decade-long journey into deep space that aims to place the first lander on a comet.

Rosetta began orbiting the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet to glean information about the mass of dirty ice, dust and gas, according to the European Space Agency, which launched the probe in 2004. In November, it’s due to send a smaller landing craft down onto the comet to take more measurements.

“Ten years we’ve been in the car waiting to get to scientific Disneyland,” ESA Senior Scientific Adviser Mark McCaughrean said on Wednesday on ESA’s online TV channel. “And we’re there now.”

Scientists hope to learn about the early evolution of the solar system by studying comets, which date back 4.6 billion years when the planets were forming. Researchers also are searching for organic molecules that represent the building blocks for life, which comets may have brought to Earth in its early years.

“It’ll help us to model better the evolution of the planets out of the pre-solar nebula,” said Gerhard Schwehm, an ESA consultant and manager of the mission from its lift-off until he retired last year. “There will be a lot of information that helps us understand how processes worked and what happened 4 1/2 billion years ago. It’s information from the infancy of our solar system.”

Completion of a slowing manoeuvre by Rosetta to begin its first triangular orbit about 100 kilometres from the comet was announced at about 11:30am. German time on ESA’s online broadcast by Spacecraft Operations Manager Sylvain Lodiot. “She did it for us,” he said.

ESA posted on its Twitter feed a picture of Churyumov- Gerasimenko and said “hello comet,” following it up with the same phrase in languages including German, Spanish, French and Italian.

“This is the start of the real mission that Rosetta was built for — it’s the kickoff of the real science phase,” Mr Schwehm said by phone from ESA’s mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. “We’re at the comet and now starting to monitor it and study it in detail.”

The Rosetta mission is the first attempt to orbit and land a probe on a comet. ESA’s first deep-space mission, Giotto, was sent to investigate Halley’s Comet in 1986. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration has also launched two missions to study comets in the past 20 years.

Instruments aboard the orbiter and the lander will measure the chemical composition of the comet, its density and how strong the surface is. They’ll also monitor gases and dust ejected by the comet. The landing craft, Philae is due to land around November 11. It will be able to drill about 20 centimetres into the comet, Mr Schwehm said.

Astrium, now part of Airbus Defence and Space, was the main contractor for the spacecraft launched on March 2, 2004. Since then, Rosetta has taken a circuitous route to Churyumov- Gerasimenko, using a gravitational “kick” from Mars and three from Earth to gain enough velocity to reach the comet.

The 6.4 billion-kilometre journey has taken the craft as far as a billion kilometres from Earth. It’s now more than 400 million kilometres from Earth and about 540 million kilometres from the Sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, according to the ESA website. Rosetta is scheduled to orbit the comet until the end of 2015.

“We’ve had to be very patient,” Mr Schwehm said. “It took more than 10 years to get to our target, but we’re there now.”

The Paris-based European Space Agency was formed in 1973 and has 20 member countries, including the UK, Germany and France.

* Bloomberg News