Launched from earth over a decade ago to rendezvous with a
comet more than half a billion miles away from earth, is the Rosetta Probe the
little robotic spacecraft that could?
By: Ringo Bones
When it was launched off the Arianne spaceport in French
Guiana back in March 2, 2004, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Probe with a
mission to rendezvous with a comet more 10 years later could for all intents
and purposes pass muster as a mission to the unknown. The craft was placed in a
decade long hibernation once it escaped the bonds of earth’s gravity and was
reactivated earlier this year. It gained headline news status and attention of
the major news networks when it successfully caught up to and orbited around Comet
67P - also known as Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko - during the middle of November 2014. Although once it – more or less –
successfully landed the Philae Lander on the surface of Comet 67P back in
November 15, 2014 did the Rosetta Space Probe became the little spacecraft that
could.
The major unavoidable hazard of launching space-probes on
long-duration space missions is that when they arrive at their destinations, they
will inevitably be using what was the state-of-the-art technology at the time
of their launch date. The Rosetta Probe’s 4-megapixel Osiris camera – although very
state-of-the-art back when it was designed and built back in 2003 – is somewhat
quaint by comparison to the built in cameras used on entry level mobile smart-phone
cameras circa 2014, except the Rosetta Probe’s mere 4-megapixel camera – though
lacking in resolution in comparison to contemporary consumer counterparts – can
see portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that the latest i-Phone can’t with
quantum efficiencies better than Ronald Reagan era Keyhole reconnaissance satellites.
Although it was the Philae Lander that eventually became the
star of the show when it successfully landed on the surface of Comet 67P
despite a “shaky” bouncy landing due to the failure of deployment of the beryllium-copper
harpoons supposedly used to anchor the Lander on the surface of the comet
because the gravitational pull on the surface of Comet 67P is 100,000 times
less than that on the earth’s surface. The washing machine sized Philae Lander –
which weighs 100-kilograms on the earth’s surface – only weighs 1 gram on the
surface of Comet 67P thus the necessity of the beryllium-copper harpoons needed
to anchor the Lander firmly on the comet’s surface.
Even though Professor Derrick Pitts – chief astronomer of
the Franklin Institute – was concerned when the Philae Lander bounced off into
a dark part / shadowy cliff of the surface of the Comet 67P which it can’t use
its solar photovoltaic panels to power its instruments in analyzing the
composition of the comet, the Lander had enough juice in its on-board reserve
batteries to do a series of scientific analysis of the comet and sent the
valuable data back to earth before losing power and reverting to sleep mode.
Preliminary analysis of the data sent by the Philae Lander has shown that it
has detected a wealth of organic compounds on the comet’s surface near the
landing zone. And it is also worth mentioning that at the distance between Comet 67P / Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and earth, radio signals sent from the Philae Lander - even moving at 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometers per second - takes almost an hour to arrive to the satellite telemetry sites tuned in to the Lander here on earth.
