Sunday 23 November 2014

Rosetta: most badass thing to happen since the moon landing

For the griff

Someday, we will all look back to these past few weeks and say, “I was there.”
 
A few of us will actually be telling the truth. The rest will only wish they had been paying attention to what, simply put, is the most bad-ass and amazing thing our collective species has achieved since Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon.
 
I’m talking about the Rosetta mission, the greatest mission most of you had not heard about until last week, when it launched a lander called Philae that  managed to survive a landing on the surface of the comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The comet is orbiting the sun at an average speed of 135,000 kilometres per hour. 
 
At that speed,  the comet could circle the Earth three times in one hour. 
 
Philae survived its landing and was able to conduct almost all of its scientific experiments in spite of having several of its landing systems fail, and bouncing off the surface of the comet up over one kilometre into the sky, only to land again and bounce a second time and land on the side of a cliff.
It powered down because it was unable to get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries – the comet itself is as black as coal.
 
When Churyumov-Gerasimenko makes its turn around the sun, the lander may in fact get a second burst of energy, resulting in more delicious, juicy science. According to the European Space Agency, we already know that the very thin atmosphere surrounding the nucleus of the comet contains organic compounds, which could mean anything from methane gas to amino acids: the building blocks of the proteins we are made of. 
 
This may strengthen the theory that the building blocks for life came from somewhere other than Earth.
 
This is the latest feat in a long history of historic firsts in space exploration that has marked the Rosetta mission. This is a good ship. The Rosetta is built with ten rockets: six for propulsion and four to slow down, and was clocked by the ESA at 48,024 km/h at one point. 
 
To reach Churyumov-Gerasimenko is to cover a mind-blowing distance of over 6.4 billion kilometres over almost 10 years. I’m not even going to attempt to come up with a metaphor for that. Let’s just say it’s a bloody long drive. 
 
To achieve this, the Rosetta combined its six rocket thrusters with a classic trick of the space robot trade, known as the slingshot effect – made famous by saving the Apollo 13 mission. The slingshot effect is buzzing close to a large body and using its gravitational pull to throw oneself out of orbit. Chances are in the future we will be using this as the main means to get around the solar system.
Rosetta did this not once, not twice, but seven times.
 
Three times with large asteroids, three times around the earth, during one of which a group of primitive hominids mistook the ship for a meteor in danger of striking the Earth maneuver and a kobayashi-maru around Mars where Rosetta was unable to use its solar panels to power its internal systems while it was in a very low orbit. 
 
In the end, Rosetta had to power itself  using the lander’s battery, something it was not supposed to be able to do, and flew blind.
 
It made it through, and even took some photos of Mars while it was at it.
 
Rosetta is a beast.
 
Not only that, but according to the ESA, the payoff for the $1.8 billion mission is huge. Rosetta has employed over 2,000 people in 10 years. Not a huge number until you remember these are 2,000 engineers. Now that’s economic growth.
 
We should also consider Rosetta’s solar panels. New ESA solar panel technology, called Low-intensity Low Temperature Cells, enabled Rosetta to be the first spacecraft to travel past the asteroid belt using solar power alone. 
 
This thing is several hundred million miles away from the sun, and it’s drawing a charge off its light. Imagine what that could do on Earth?
 
Hell, if we can keep building hardcore spacecraft like this, it won’t be much longer until we’re walking on Mars.

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