World first, European first to rendezvous with comet to understand how life began on earth. There are various theories like life started from comets; life started in the primordial plasma brew, etc. This European effort was to look at that puzzle; by landing a probing station on a frigid, icy comet and learn from looking at its surface carefully.
The numbers are staggering. It has taken almost 10 years to come to this stage for the lab to be deployed on the comet which has not much of a gravitational pull. The rendezvous point is some 500 million kms from earth and the lab was supposed to harpoon itself to the surface much like Moby Dick, did but looks like it could not land on the intended, chosen position yet. Probaly few more attempts will be made, albeit a different location for landing.
http://indianexpress.com/article/world/europe/european-probe-philae-lands-on-comet-fails-to-anchor/
As of the above link it is still not clear the status of the landing on the surface. Philae, the name of the lab separated from the mother Rosetta as scheduled.
This is what NASA has to say about this feat:
“How audacious, how exciting, how unbelievable to be able to dare to land on a comet, to take that step that we’ve all wanted from a scientific perspective”
Read this interesting account:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/rosetta-comet-landing-could-teach-us-about-life-on-earth-a-1002222.html
Video is from here:
This one from U-Tube:
The numbers are staggering. It has taken almost 10 years to come to this stage for the lab to be deployed on the comet which has not much of a gravitational pull. The rendezvous point is some 500 million kms from earth and the lab was supposed to harpoon itself to the surface much like Moby Dick, did but looks like it could not land on the intended, chosen position yet. Probaly few more attempts will be made, albeit a different location for landing.
http://indianexpress.com/article/world/europe/european-probe-philae-lands-on-comet-fails-to-anchor/
As of the above link it is still not clear the status of the landing on the surface. Philae, the name of the lab separated from the mother Rosetta as scheduled.
This is what NASA has to say about this feat:
“How audacious, how exciting, how unbelievable to be able to dare to land on a comet, to take that step that we’ve all wanted from a scientific perspective”
Read this interesting account:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/rosetta-comet-landing-could-teach-us-about-life-on-earth-a-1002222.html
Video is from here:
No comments:
Post a Comment