The Music of the Spheres is an ancient idea that there is a kind of universal music which is related to the movement of heavenly bodies like the Sun, the Moon and the planets. And although it turns out that Comet 67P, the focus of the Rosetta mission, is more of an ugly duckling than a perfect sphere, […]
[youtube]http://youtu.be/UqcDtRmJbKY[/youtube] At 10am GMT on the 20 January 2014, an ‘alarm clock’ went off on board a tiny spaceship, more than 800 million kilometres from Earth. The European Space Agency’s craft Rosetta began restarting its systems after a 31-month ‘deep-space hibernation’, which had brought it out past the orbit of Jupiter and into pole position for its rendezvous […]
The gripping story of the Rosetta mission’s rendezvous with and landing on Comet 67P was one of the big science stories of 2014. Now as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, Astronomy Ireland is marking the new year with a lecture by one of the scientists working on data from Rosetta, to be held in Trinity College Dublin tonight. Dr Pedro […]
The Philae landing craft successfully landed on Comet 67P yesterday as part of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. Scientists at Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany celebrated as they received the signal from Rosetta confirming the landing. At a press briefing later, the news was confirmed, although it was also revealed that the harpoon mechanism designed […]
This week, the Rosetta spacecraft reached the destination it’s been working towards since its launch in 2004, and for many years before that: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. On RTÉ’s Drivetime on Wednesday, Kevin O’Rourke of The Planetary Society, pointed out that this project has become the life’s work of a generation of scientists, including many here in Ireland. It’s a mission on an […]
