Rosetta Spacecraft Makes Historic Comet Rendezvous [Video]
The European Space Agency’s comet-chasing mission arrives after a 10-year journey

8-6-2014 | Elizabeth Gibney & Nature magazine

No one can deny that it was an epic trip. The European Space Agency’s comet-chasing Rosetta spacecraft has arrived at its quarry, after launching more than a decade ago and traveling 6.4 billion kilometers through the Solar System.

That makes it the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, and takes the mission a step closer to its next, more ambitious goal of performing the first ever soft landing on a comet. Speaking from mission control, Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist, called the space mission “the sexiest there’s ever been.”

Rosetta is now within 100 kilometers of its target, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which was recently discovered to be shaped like a rubber duck. After a six-minute thruster burn, at 11.29am local time this morning (August 6), scientists at ESA’s Operations Centre, in Darmstadt, Germany, confirmed that Rosetta had moved into the same orbit around the sun as the comet.

Rosetta is now moving at a walking pace relative to 67P – though both are hurtling through space at 15 kilometers per second.

Unlike NASA’s Deep Impact and Stardust craft, and ESA’s own Giotto mission, which flew by their target comets at high speed, Rosetta will now settle in for the long haul, taking a ring-side seat as 67P approaches the Sun, and eventually swings around it, next August.

In the coming weeks, Rosetta will hover slightly ahead of the 4km-wide comet, and gradually spiral inwards, moving in arcs on its Sun-side that form the edges of ever-smaller triangles. This will eventually take it as close as 10 kilometers to the comet: only from below 30km will the comet’s weak gravitational field be able to keep the probe in orbit.

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