Mission to Harpoon Comet is Back on Track

An anonymous reader writes "The Rosetta mission planners have announced today that after an indefinite launch delay earlier this year, their goal of landing on a comet is back on track. Their new baseline target is a rendezvous with the comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in November 2014. En route to the comet, Rosetta will inspect two asteroids (Otawara and Siwa) at close quarters."

Comments

Important Mission

[JJ]

Comets coming from the Oort cloud contain the least contaminated matter from the start of the solar system. Exploring and sampling material from them actually answer a wide variety of questions including matters about the origin of life. Finding amino acids in the sample would imply that life on Earth was not self-generating.

Re:Important Mission

[tomem]

The catch is that it really isn't possible to rendezvous with a comet that has recently been in the Oort cloud. Those orbits are too eccentric so we are more likely to visit a pretty old comet that has been processed in the inner solar system for a long time and has settled into a relatively more accessible orbit.

NASA aborted such a mission, the Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission or CRAF, in 1992 after developing it for five years, in favor of the Cassini mission to Saturn and its moon Titan.

Re:I don't know dude...

[73939133]

The US space program doesn't look a lot better: a reusable launch vehicle that is more expensive per launch than disposable launch vehicles, two shuttles that have blown up, Mars probes that just disappear, and on and on.

Over the last couple of decades, the European space program doesn't seem to have screwed up any more than the US space program. OTOH, it seems to be a bit more cost-effective and fewer people die in it.

Re:Implications for Life development...

[Sparr0]

However, if there were manned Mars missions planned, we wouldn't have any money left for all this neat science.

Apparently someone hasnt kept up with Mars Direct which includes proposales that outline a viable real world plan for putting men on mars within a decade for a cost of less than $6B.

Re:I don't know dude...

[botzi]

..Over the last couple of decades, the European space program doesn't seem to have screwed up any more than the US space program. OTOH, it seems to be a bit more cost-effective and fewer people die in it....

Without having the actual numbers, I feel ready to bet that "not screwing more", when launching several times less is not a great advantage...
Anyway, it may be true that Ariane had fewer "problems", but that doesn't m33n they're less spectacular;o))))....

Btw, I'm European so no offense... simply enough, when I first read the floating point register explanation for some lanch accident... it was far too much to not lol.....
Damn, it's hard to finish those phrases at 2am....;o)