How we landed on a comet 300 million miles away

Key Takeaways

we just reached an entirely new milestone in space exploration a mission could go to a comet drill out a sample and to bring it back to earth the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft just landed a small 220 pound robot onto a comment making it the seventh celestial body we've ever landed a spacecraft on previous missions have flown by comets and in 2005 NASA intentionally crashed a spacecraft into a comet to analyze its interior but this is the first mission to make a controlled landing on one comets are frigid chunks of ice and rock that orbit the Sun they're a bit like asteroids except they have more elliptical orbits that sometimes take them so close to the Sun that they start to vaporize creating the bright tails they're known for scientists think comets may have brought water and complex organic molecules to earth which we can thank for our existence the common in question is called 67p cg named after ukrainian astronomers who first spotted it in 1969 it's sort of duck shaped and about two and a half miles wide picture a rock the size of Japan's Mount Fuji rotating every 12 hours and moving through space at about 84,000 miles per hour millions of miles away from Earth comet 67p orbits the Sun every six-and-a-half years from a point just beyond Jupiter to reach it Rosetta had to loop around several times passing by Earth and Mars to use their gravity as a slingshot as a result it's been traveling for more than a decade nope it left earth way back in March of 2004 and has traveled over 3.5 billion miles to reach the comet that's nearly 40 times the distance from the earth to the Sun as it traveled too far to be powered by the Sun the spacecraft went into hibernation for two and a half years on the way there Rosetta woke up at the beginning of this year and caught up with a comment anonymous just putting the probe in orbit around the comet was a major feat we'd never done that before especially since engineers expected a potato-shaped comet and ended up with a duck last month scientists picked out a site field lander a nice smooth flat spot on the comet smaller lobe the lander flew down to the comet over the course of several hours slowing itself down and eventually the speed of a person walking here we have very very low gravity so this land of Richmond has a mass of about a hundred kilogram will have been weight off about a sheet of paper when it comes down on the column the problem is to stay there after ten years of flight the lander has an incredibly short amount of time to conduct science on the Comets surface 64 hours that's how long his battery lasts and that's how long it has to drill into the comet collect soil samples and chemically analyze them after that the lander deactivates unless can get enough solar power to recharge but Rosetta will continue to orbit the comet and keep sending back photos and other data until December 2015 when the comet heads back out of the inner solar system all this research will tell us more about the composition of comets than we've ever known before and because comets are the oldest things we can reach this information could help us better understand the very beginnings of our solar system you [Music]