It’s a great day for gee whiz science news (except there’s hardly any new science yet). It is from an agency usually eclipsed by NASA’s once-common mega-missions to distant solar system locales, the European Space Agency. Its boxy Rosetta spacecraft, toting a small lander, has spent ten years careering around Earth and Mars to get gravity boosts sufficient to fling it out to intercept comet 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko, a chunk of minerals and ice that never gets close enough to Earth to see with the naked eye. So as celebrity goes this is 67P’s (alternately, C-G for short) only shot at fame and it is a superstar. The mission is clever, difficult, complex, and inherently appealing. The target is, as comets go, a short-period and pedestrian thing. It circles the Sun every 6.7 years on an ellipse reaching from a bit beyond Jupiter to somewhat inward of Earth. No worries, it is on a plane that will plunk it into no planet, not at all soon anyway.
The big news, other than it got there, is that the closeup photos are very cool. The thing is nearly two things: big craggy lumps with a narrow isthmus connecting them. Some of the approach images have been stitched into a video of the thing getting closer and closer. ESA press material is in Grist below. The bigger news shall take months to come in – assuming the instruments do their job as the comet and its Earth-machine companion get nearer the sun. The ices will warm enough to sublimate water vapor and entrained dustbunnies or whatever it is made of besides H2O with enough vigor to billow away into a coma and perhaps a tail. As this comet presumably was born far from the Sun and only recently got perturbed into the inner solar system, experts say it ought to offer clues to the early composition and evolution of Sun’s family. Hence ‘Rosetta’, an ancient stone with clues to reading a strange language.
I am about to do a full roundup, below. Reading a sampling of the stories brought a small letdown. The press material and stories all say that the hitchhiking Philae lander will be directed to land, with a harpoon anchor as a hold-down in the feeble gravity, in November. This led me to wonder how tough that maneuver is. I fixated on the rotation rate of the lumpy, 2.5-miles (4 km or so) comet nucleus. Is it spinning fast enough to complicate things? I looked it up. It rotates at a leisurely one revolution every 12 hours or so. So I will keep a look-out for reporters who dug up that slightly arcane fact as well. I could not be the only reader trying to visualize this feat. One also wonders, as many accounts say the probe is in orbit around the comet, what kind of period that orbit now has and what it will be as it adjusts to its closest observation point, about 18 miles or 30 km, over coming months.
There is a more to say about it. A lot is in the day’s coverage. There are so many accounts form major outlets (and small) I am going to save time by not typing out all the headlines. I may include those that jump out as surprising, fabulously clever or awful. Links are through the bylines. The heds haven’t much variety anyway.
Stories:
- New Yorker – Michael Lemonick; Actually, this one has a strikingly evocative, short hed: Rosetta Meets the Comet. Must be a literary allusion but I can’t come up with its inspiration. Lemonick does a fine job with the classy, relaxed, and compact prose the NYer tends to run. Lemonick came to this story prepared, offering quotes and info from mission scientists that he got going back several months. Quite nice is a description of the internal imaging the mission will obtain, via a sort of CAT scan with radio waves, of the comet’s insides.
- The Economist No Byline as usual ; But one is confident a Brit (also as usual) wrote it. The first words, “The maths, or course, were straightforward.” Then comes a tidy package of history and precise description of how the machine got this far.
- The Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Naturally for a European readership one finds stress that after many zooming flyby missions this is history’s first rendezvous, as in prolonged visit, with a comet. Expansion on that angle is in a second story, including reminder that ESA had a great disappointment with a comet when its Giotto spacecraft blacked out just before closest approach, by Stuart Clark. Good illus.
- NY Times – Kenneth Chang. This is the update for actual arrival. Much was also in a one-day previous Chang story. The update includes an ambitious graphic charting out the looping trajectory the Rosetta followed.
- BBC – Pallab Ghosh ; Unexpected hed: Will the Rosetta mission finally end our fear of comets? Who is the we in ‘our’ anyway? Are we all medieval villagers? The story is, in fact, about the history of comets in the public (and academic) imagination with its angle this new mission. The Beeb also has a conventional arrival-at-target story and an analysis by science editor David Shukman plus an atmospheric Shukman story comparing ESA’s style to NASA’s.
- Reuters – Maria Sheahan ; Which includes note that ESA’s orbital mechanicians have work to do. So far, they don’t even know where the comet’s center of mass is.
- NPR – Geoff Brumfiel ;
- Space.com – Kelly Dickerson ; Filed on eve of rendezvous, with a good animation of the orbital cleverness that made it possible.
- Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts ; Plenty of detail on what the close-ups show on the comet. Spotts , thank you, also wondered about the rotation period, and reports it (see introductory comments in post above).
- Wall Street Journal – Gautam Naik;
- LAT Times – Deborah Netburn ; A lively and mostly conventional story, with a closing that reveals that the “Science Now” online LAT section has a lot of blog in its ethos. The sign-off is “On behalf of the citizens of the world, we’d like to congratulate [the Rosetta team] on what they have accomplished so far and wish them luck in the mission’s next chapter!.
- is much more, apologies to any good ones that missed the sweep, let me know via “suggest a story” of any reporting – including your own – that ought to be added.
*UPDATES:
- The Planetary Society – Daniel Fischer – Nice hed: Rendezvous with a Crazy World ; Did see this during the first track on Friday, but assumed it was a Pl. Soc. congratulatory press release or something. Fischer is an amateur astronomer and freelance astronomy writer in Germany who filed from the Rosetta programs operational hq. Lots of snapshots of the happy team. Very knowledgeable and detailed report, too.
- Universe Today – Elizabeth Howell: Photo gallery plus a short story (or fat caption) on the search for a good spot to land the little Philae probe. Later this year it is to detach from the main spacecraft and settle on the comet (more like anchor, with a harpoon).
- TIME Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Mike wrote the story twice, each from the ground up in verbiage.
Grist for the Mill: ESA press release, ESA press conference 1 hr 27m video; NASA press release ; Max Planck Inst. for Solar System Research Press Release; Rosetta twitter page ;
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