Rosetta Mission Poster | Flickr User European Space Agency | Flickr Creative Commons
I’ll admit it, this whole Rosetta Mission sorta just snuck up on me. I mean sure it was launched in 2004, but I was too busy watching the The West Wing and hearing about fake space missions to care about real ones. To me there are a three things that are really exciting about this mission.
- 10 year long mission– The Rosetta mission was a product of the European Space Agency, which is basically like NASA but for Europe. Take a look at this timeline. I cannot even begin to imagine how smart these people are who came up with this idea of how to land on a moving comet. I also love the idea that they were able to accept that it would take 10 years and they say lets do it anyway. Why do it? The first 45 seconds of President Kennedy’s speech still applies. The joke at the beginning is subtle, who knew the President had a little sense of humor.
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Signal received from Rosetta | Flickr User European Space Agency | Flickr Creative Commons
It landed– When I was taking Earth Science during my freshmen year, my teacher said we didn’t go to the moon anymore because no one knew how to land on the surface. Well, Philae nailed it and is already uploading pictures like someone new to Instagram. Take that, skeptical science teachers! Well that might not be entirely accurate. Philae didn’t quite land perfectly and as a result it ran out of power because it is solar powered. Philae 2014-2014: you will be missed.
- Deep Impact and Armageddon just became more plausible– Sure, I’m not a scientist, and we’ll need to work on the speed, but we can land on a comet now. Which means if it is heading towards earth, we can also blow up that comet (boom..logic). Sure the comet lovers out there might complain, but do we really want this to happen?:
Space Travel is dangerous business, The Challenger and Columbia explosions are proof of that. But still we return to space going further than before. Unless the many Star Trek series have lied to me, maybe space really is the final frontier and we go for no other reason than to explore. All in all, another successful day for the human race and particularly the scientists that made this happen.
