Countdown begins to landing lab on comet
Print Edition
ONE of the biggest gambles in space history comes to a climax on Wednesday when Europe attempts to make the first-ever landing on a comet.
Speeding toward the sun at 65,000 kilometers per hour, a lab called Philae will detach from its mother ship Rosetta, heading for a deep-space rendezvous.
The probe will seek out a tiny landing site on the surface of an object darker than coal, 500 million kilometers from home.
“It’s not going to be an easy business,” was the understated prediction of Philippe Gaudon of France’s National Center for Space as the mission prepared to enter countdown mode.
The stakes facing Rosetta managers in Germany are daunting as the 1.3 billion euro (US$1.6 billion) project reaches a peak.
Two decades of work have been poured into what could be a crowning moment in space exploration.
The goal: the first laboratory research into the primeval matter of the Solar System — ancient ice and dust that some experts believe might have helped to sow life on Earth itself.
Rosetta has already sent home fascinating data on the comet, but Philae will provide the first boots-on-the-ground assessment.
Like Rosetta, it will wield a mass spectrometer, a high-tech tool to analyze a sample’s chemical signature, aimed at drawing up a complete carbon inventory.
The showstopper find would be molecules known as left-handed amino acids, the European Space Agency said.
“These are the ‘bricks’ with which all proteins on Earth are built,” it said.
After its launch in 2004, Rosetta spent 10 years zig-zagging around Earth and Mars, using the planets’ gravitational pull as a slingshot to build up speed to reach its prey, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Rosetta finally caught up with it in August.
“It took a billion calculations to find a decent landing site,” said astrophysicist Francis Rocard.
Seeking to cover all the possibilities, Philae’s designers have equipped the lander with three outstretched legs designed to dampen the impact.
When the lab touches down, it will fire two harpoons to secure it, while a thruster will fire to cancel out bounce.
The chances of success? “Seventy percent,” said Gaudon, admitting to days of doubt that the chances were much better than one in two.
“We will need to be lucky,” added Andrea Accomazzo, the mission’s flight director.
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