Rosetta: the first ever successful comet landing

[The Hammer]

Space probe scores a 310-million-mile bull's-eye with comet landing

http://rt.com/news/204911-rosetta-landing-comet-philae/

The lander will study the comet’s surface, while scientists are keen on finding out if it contains any organic amino acids. This could yield vital clues about the beginning of our solar system and the origin of life on Earth.

Comets are icy bodies that are regarded as fossils that originated at the solar system’s inception, and they could provide scientists with some primordial material to investigate.

That is why comets coming from the distant Oort cloud, rare guests to the inner solar system and therefore ‘untouched’ by the sun, present original materials that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

[squealpiggy]

Amazing stuff. We're the shit, we are.

[Beercules]

Should be interesting what is discovered.

[Russian Crushin]

[Beercules]

Wow that's amazing

[squealpiggy]

One analyst said it was like a fly landing on a moving baseball. The velocities at play are incredible.

[BTL]

I didn't think it was going to land.

[The Hammer]

Truly amazing.

[Tom Cruise]

incredible.

[The Noose]

Blows me away. I expected a thread about this before.

Some facts...

Rosetta probe spent a decade traversing about 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) to make its historic rendezvous with Comet 67P/C-G .


Touchdown for the lander played out 510m kilometres from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, on a comet hurtling through space at more than 18km/s. At so vast a distance, even radio signals travelling at the speed of light take nearly half an hour to travel from Earth to the spacecraft, making real-time control of the landing impossible. Instead, the entire descent was precalculated, uploaded and run automatically.

And its big.