Spacecraft Rosetta catches up to comet after 10-year chase

Spacecraft Rosetta catches up to comet after 10-year chase

Spacecraft Rosetta catches up to comet after 10-year chase

This artist impression released by the European Space Agency on December 3, 2012 of the Rosetta orbiter at comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko. AFP PHoto

European spacecraft Rosetta became the first ever to catch up with a comet on Aug. 6, a landmark stage in a decade-long space mission that scientists hope will help unlock some of the secrets of the solar system.

Rosetta, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2004, will accompany comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on its trip around the sun and land a probe on it later this year in an unprecedented manoeuvre.

Scientists are now on a tight schedule to learn enough about the comet using data from Rosetta to safely land the spacecraft's probe on it in November.

"We know what the comet's shape is. But we haven't really measured its gravity, we don't know yet where the centre of mass is," Rosetta Flight Director Andrea Accomazzo told Reuters ahead of the rendezvous.

As it neared 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko this year, Rosetta took pictures revealing that it is not shaped, as had been assumed, like a rugby or American football, but rather comprises two segments connected by a neck, giving it an asymmetrical shape that has been likened to a duck.

Scientists hope data the probe gathers on the surface of the comet will allow them to peek into a kind of astronomical time capsule that has preserved for millions of years clues about what the world looked like when our solar system was born.

It has taken Rosetta 10 years, five months and four days to reach the comet, a roughly 3-by-5 km rock discovered in 1969. On its way, the spacecraft circled the sun on a widening spiral course, swinging past Earth and Mars to pick up speed and adjust its trajectory.


Because the trip is so long and took Rosetta so far from the sun's solar rays, the spacecraft was put in a deep sleep for 31 months and woken up earlier this year.

