#Mindblowingscience Let this sink in for a moment. We are about to harpoon a fn comet. On this Earth day of August 6, 2014, a wonderful feat will be achieved, recorded into our timeline of human history, and will set a precedent for subsequent robotic emissaries moving forward. Amidst the strife and persecution, the tyranny, war, genocide; the economic woes throttling the health and welfare of our civilization bred from artificial barriers we’ve constructed - mental and physical - that mortgage our longevity as a species…amidst the turmoil constantly blinding us from our preciousness in space and time which we owe to the biological sophistication of our single-celled ancestors, …we’ve come together, both NASA and ESA - a consortium of 20 member states - to now witness another demonstration of international collaboration. The dream, inception, construction, and launch - in 2004 - of a spacecraft (and accompanying lander) now beginning its rendezvous with a planetary body, a comet, dubbed 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, named after discoverers Klim Ivanovych Churyumov and Svetlana Ivanova Gerasimenko, who first observed it on photographic plates in 1969. To recap: This morning, the European Space Agency’s probe Rosetta arrived at the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (no, I’m not sure how to pronounce it either). The probe has been in space since 2004, slingshotting around Earth and Mars to gain momentum and traveling more than 3.5 billion miles. In a couple months, Rosetta’s lander will harpoon the comet, and begin to take measurements on it’s surface. Comets are the oldest things in our solar system, and we have a lot to learn about what they are made of and how they form. We didn’t even know what this comet looked like until a couple months ago, when Rosetta sent back the first grainy images. NPR reporter Geoff Brumfiel thinks it looks like a celestial rubber ducky. ESA scientist Matt Taylor thinks it looks like a monopoly boot. I think it looks like failed attempt at a Chinese takeout aluminum foil swan. You can follow the probe on twitter: @esa_rosetta The spacecraft is just as intriguing as the comet, however. Rosetta is a joint operation: a probe and a lander. The probe, Rosetta, is named after the Egyptian basalt slab - the Rosetta Stone - which were inscribed three distinct scripts of various origin: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. The lander’s name - Philae - was provided its name due to the Nile Island ‘Philae’, to which one of two obelisks were discovered which were inscribed with Ancient Greek and Egyptian inscriptions as well.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 16:10:01 +0000
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