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Tuesday, 14 January, 2003, 21:53 GMT
Q&A: Rosetta mission
![]() Rosetta will probe the origin of the Solar System
How novel is this mission? There have been only a handful of missions to comets and asteroids. Spacecraft have flown through the tails of comets or passed close to asteroids capturing images. The big difference with Rosetta is that it will attempt to land a robot on a comet for the first time - an ambitious technical challenge. The closest we have come so far was when the US space agency (Nasa) landed the spacecraft Near on the asteroid Eros in February 2001.
"Giotto was a fleeting glimpse," says Dr Christopher Lee of Imperial College London. "This is even more ambitious because we need to catch up with the comet, stay with it, orbit it and then land a lander on it." Rosetta's primary target, Comet Wirtanen, was ruled out when concerns surfaced about the spacecraft's launch rocket and the mission was delayed. But a new target, when it is chosen, will probably be a similar body with an orbit that takes it out to planet Jupiter. "The European Space Agency has never done anything that has gone as far as Jupiter before," says Dr Chris Carr of Imperial College London. "That's been in the realm of the Americans - so it's quite a departure." What other mission to comets have there been?
Are any other comet missions in the pipeline? Yes - a Nasa mission known as Deep Impact. It aims to blast a crater in a comet and analyse the debris. Deep Impact is heading for Comet Tempel 1, another member of the Jupiter family of comets. It is scheduled for launch in July 2002. Another Nasa comet mission, Contour, was lost in 2002. It was meant to rendezvous with at least two comets over the course of four years on a 48-million-km journey. Contour was supposed to get within 100 km of Comet Encke in 2003 and Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 in 2006. Images courtesy of Astrium.>
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