Celebrating a year at the comet

This article is mirrored from the main ESA Web Portal ESA’s Rosetta mission today celebrates one year at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, with its closest approach to the Sun now just one week away. It’s been a long but exciting journey for Rosetta since its launch in 2004, featuring Earth, Mars and two asteroid flybys before arriving at its ultimate destination on 6 August 2014. Over the following months, the mission became the first ever to orbit a comet and the first to soft land a probe – Philae – on its surface. The mission teams have had to overcome many challenges in learning to fly in an unpredictable and sometimes inhospitable environment, and the spacecraft has returned a wealth of outstanding scientific data from this intriguing comet, spanning its interior, the dramatic surface and the surrounding cloud of dust, gas and plasma. “This mission is about scientific discovery and every day there is something new to wonder at and try to understand,” says Nicolas Altobelli, acting Rosetta project scientist. “A year of observations near to the comet has provided us with a wealth of information about it, and we’re looking forward to another year of exploration.” Highlights thus far have included the discovery that the comet’s water vapour has a different ‘flavour’ to Earth’s oceans, fuelling the debate on the possible role of comets and asteroids in delivering water to our planet in its early history. The first detection of molecular nitrogen in a comet provided important clues about the temperature environment in which the comet was ‘born’. Molecular nitrogen was common when the Solar System was forming, but required very low temperatures to become trapped in ice, so Rosetta’s measurements support the theory that comets originate from the cold and distant Kuiper Belt. Data collected by Rosetta and Philae during […]

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