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.