The Hindu : Rosetta on way to probe origin of solar system

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 03, 2004

International

International

Rosetta on way to probe origin of solar system

DARMSTADT (GERMANY), MARCH 2. A European rocket blasted off on Tuesday on a pioneering 10-year journey to land a probe on a comet and search for clues to the solar system's origins.

The Rosetta lander soared into the skies above South America atop an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana. About two hours later, a 17-minute engine burn sent the spacecraft out of the earth's gravitational pull and on its way to the comet.

``We received the first communication from the spacecraft, which means the spacecraft is in good shape at the moment. Everything seems to be OK,'' Gaele Winters, the European Space Agency's director of operational and technical support, said at mission control in Darmstadt after the engine firing. Rosetta is expected to reach an ice-caked comet called 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko in May 2014 and go into orbit around it, then release the lander that will try to touch down on the surface. Previous spacecraft have made only brief fly-bys of comets.

A first launch attempt on Thursday was scrapped because of high winds in the upper atmosphere.

The second attempt was abandoned on Friday when a routine inspection found that a piece of insulating foam had fallen off the main booster stage — raising fears that ice could form at the hole and break off after lift-off, possibly damaging the rocket.

A chunk of insulation doomed the U.S. space shuttle Columbia last year when it broke off after launch and damaged the craft's wing, leading to catastrophic failure during re-entry into the atmosphere and the death of the crew of seven.

European space officials and scientists at mission control toasted their success with champagne after Rosetta was blasted out of the Earth's orbit, accelerating to almost 40,000 kmph.

Scientists hope the mission will reveal clues about the birth of the sun and the planets of the solar system, since comets are the system's most primitive objects — formed when it was still very young, more than 4.6 billion years ago.

Since comets pelted Earth in the time after the solar system formed, scientists theorise they may have brought some of the building blocks for life, like water and organic materials onto our planet. 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko, discovered by two Soviet astronomers in 1969, is only 3 to 5 km in diameter and has gravity so weak that the Rosetta lander will have to use a harpoon and spikes to fasten itself to its surface.

The comet has been intensively studied using the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in preparation for the mission.

Named after the Rosetta Stone tablet that helped historians decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Rosetta lander is to test the comet's composition with nine experiments .

The craft will take a roundabout route, swinging through the gravitational fields of Earth and Mars, picking up speed before heading into deep space.

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