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Successful Rosetta Lift-Off
CrystalFalcon writes "The BBC is reporting that the Rosetta spacecraft has had a successful lift-off after a two cancelled launch attempts. Rosetta is targeted at a near-Earth comet, and features a 'lander.' The European Space Agency has more information on the mission."
Usually, comets eject mass not all over the place but small confined areas. I'm more worried about the electronics surviving such extreme conditions.
It will be fun to watch the firework going off. Since it takes only 6.6 years to go around the sun, this comet must be rather burned out and less active then a fresh comet from outside the solar system. Still, it must be a fantastic scenic view.
It's named after the Nile island where the Rosetta stone was discovered. Apparantly, a 15-year old girl suggested the name in some kind of competition they never bothered to tell me about and she got to go see the launch.
Money for nothing, pix for free
I wonder how the lander is going to stay on the comet once the comet gets closer to the sun and starts ejecting mass.
The lander will fire a harpoon into the comet to ensure it doesn't bounce off again.
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And if you really can't wait 10 years... NASA's Stardust will bring back some pieces of comet in only 685 days :)
karma capped
Uh, dude, this isnt Star Trek, our propulsion technology is horribly primitive and so our spaceships kinda have to "sail" instead of going directly from one place to another. You see, it would take a fuel tank the size of a small asteroid to get anywhere, and dont forget that the fuel itself has to be pushed by something, requiring even more fuel, which also has to be pushed by something...
Our current way of sending things anywhere is more like throwing a rock with your arm, after solving a bunch of really complicated equations to calculate the best way of throwing it so the wind (gravity) will give you the best free ride.
Of course they may very well want to take advantage of this opportunity to study the sun or something... I'm not a rocket scientist.
SMART is ESA's first mission using the ion drive and is used to test the technology. I think that, when the Rosetta project was given the go ahead in 1993, the ion drive was either not avalaible in its current form or SMART was selected as the test project. And you can not change the design of a long running project like Rosetta half way, without a significant cost penalty.
I saw that the NASA have launched Deep Space 1 in 1998. This probe flew by the commet Borrelly in 2001, using ion propulsion. As with the recent ESA and NASA mars missions, you can not compare the projects directly -- Deep Space 1 was a high risk project, didn't land, the speed/trajectories of the commets differ, etc -- but it shows the ion drive is certainly an option.
Pepijn Kenter.
Also, DS1 flew _past_ a comet. Rosetta is going to match orbits with a comet and stick a harpoon into it. Comet orbits are really high eccentricity, and when they're in the inner solar system they move _fast_. Matching speeds with one of these things is a hell of a job, and I'm not surprised they need so many gravity assists.
It's amazing that ion propulsion has taken so long to (ahem) take off. The first space craft to use ion thrusters was Zond 2 which flew to Mars in (wait for it) 1964! The craft suffered power failures en-route and lost communications shortly before flying past the planet at a distance of only 1500km. Had it survived, it would have been the second spacecraft to make a close approach to Mars - beaten by one month by the American probe Mariner 4.
The same ion engines were flown in 1965 on an identical spacecraft - Zond 3. It was sent past the Moon, returned some superb images and then flew on into deep space where it retransmitted the images. The Soviets were trying to improve their deep space tracking systems and used Zond 3 as a test bed for future missions.
As far as I know the engines were never flown again. Strange.
Best wishes,
Mike.