Rosetta’s Flyby a Success
March 2, 2004 was the Rosetta international spacecraft’s official entrance toward its mission, approved earlier in 1993 by the European Space Agency’s Science Program Committee. The Rosetta Mission is a Planetary Cornerstone Commission in their long-term space science program, with its original mission to have been its rendezvous with the 46P/Wirtanen comet.
Taking its name from the ancient “Rosetta Stone”, with three scripts—Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Egyptian Demotic, and Greek—shown, with only two represented. The Rosetta Stone provided the key to an ancient civilization. ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft will allow scientists to unlock the mysteries of the oldest building blocks of our Solar System - the comets.
When the launch was postponed to March of 2004, the new target became Comet 67P/Churyumov - Gerasimenko on its ten-year journey–a large dirty snowball that orbits the Sun once every 6.6 years, in a successful launch by an Ariane-5 G+ from Kourou, French Guiana. Four gravity assists were required for the mission to work: three assists by Earth and one by Mars, with extended hibernation periods required due to the long mission durations.
The next phases for the Rosetta spacecraft will be the Third Earth gravity assist on November 13, 2009, followed by the Asteroid Lutetia flyby on July 10, 2010, upon which it will enter deep space hibernation on July 2011 to January 2014 when it exits deep space hibernation. Two asteroids were planned as part of the ESA Rosetta mission—2867 Steins in the year 2008 and 21 Lutetia in the year 2010. ESA’s main objective is to rendezvous with/orbit around both of them in order to perform observations of comet’s nucleus and coma, with the 2867 successful today.
This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:23 am and is filed under Mars News, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
