[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 […]
So the other day Kim Kardashian took off all her clothes and showed us her lovely bottom, intending to ‘Break the Internet’. Unfortunately for Kim, it appears the Internet was looking the other way, towards a different heavenly body with its own distinctive curves, where a robot built by European geeks was landing on a comet the size of Carlow, […]
We’ve talked about Rosetta before. The European Space Agency’s mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko took 10 years to catch up with the comet, which is about the size of a city, and which we now know is shaped like a rubber duck! It’s also a rough uneven surface, with gravity 100,000 times less than Earth’s. Landing on it […]
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 […]
