Bravo Rosetta!

The success of the Rosetta mission has demonstrated, and quite marvellously so, that ESA (the European Space Agency) has finally come of age. In soft-landing a probe on the surface of a speeding comet they have achieved a feat equal to, or even greater than, say, NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover. After all Mars is a rather larger target (by a factor of several billion) as well as being a helluva lot closer. The most recent reports do suggest problems have arisen, which is scarcely surprising. First, its anchoring hooks failed to deploy, causing the probe to bounce more than a kilometre back into space. And when it finally fell back down it was in the lee of a steep cliff which shaded it from the sunlight it needs to keep its batteries charged.


You might be wondering why it bounced so high when it landed the first time, but the answer is simple. The escape velocity on Comet 67P Churimov-Gerasimenko, as it is charmingly named (after the Russian astronomers who discovered it in 1969), is just 3 feet per second. (compare that with the escape velocity here on Earth, which is 7 miles a second), which means a man standing on it could easily jump off it and head out into space. Another problem is the extraordinary topography of the "dirty snowball" in question, which by the way remains as good a definition of what a comet is made up of as anything else. It is riven with deep canyons and vertiginous mesas and pinnacles; indeed, the astounding photographs already sent back from Rosetta show a world remarkably similar in appearance to the comet visited by messrs. Willis, Affleck et al in the film Armageddon. Made in 1996, that film, which amongst other things featured cinema's most improbable astronaut in the shape of Steve Buscemi, seemed at the time to lack authenticity in a number of aspects. Strange then, that one of the unexpected results of the Rosetta mission has been to vindicate that film's (at the time) absurd vision of what the surface of a comet might look like.


It seems Rosetta has now gone into hibernation, though ESA mission control say it might rejuvenate when the comet draws nearer to the Sun. But even if we never hear another word from it, the mission will to me still have been a resounding success.


In  his book 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke looked forward to a world where the people of the World had finally found something as interesting and exciting as war: space exploration. We aren't there yet, by a long way unfortunately. But we are allowed to dream. One day I can envisage a world where the wealthy nations come together to build a permanent colony on the Moon, send men and women to Mars, and one day even search for life on places like Europa and Enceladus. The technology to do things like this exists already, but we are too busy trying to screw each other every chance we get to devote the energy and will to mount such ambitious projects. But in the future... None of this will happen in my lifetime but it is coming, and children born today will, with any luck, see the first two of these great projects get under way. And their grandchildren could even see the human race reaching for the stars...