WIRED 2015: Next Generation is our annual event dedicated to inspiring young minds, where innovators aged 12 to 18 years old gather at London’s Tobacco Dock for talks, hands-on workshops and Q&As. For more from the event head to our WIRED NexGen Hub.
Ten years after leaving Earth, the Rosetta comet chaser was hibernating. Two years and seven months went by. All power was shut off save for a small amount saved to run a camera and an alarm clock. Then, on January 20, 2014, Rosetta was finally close enough to the Sun that it could wake up and resume its decades-long mission to survey comet 67P.
The team at the European Space Agency was on tenterhooks, Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior scientific advisor at the ESA, told the WIRED NexGen audience at London's Tobacco Dock. Many of the researchers had spent their careers tracking comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko -- the project was first conceived in the 80s -- and this moment would define their future and past in one. "If it didn't wake up we didn't have a mission," he said. The researchers at the ESA had placed bets for when Rosetta would wake up. The last bet passed, still nothing. Then, after a tense 18 minutes, the alarm lit up and the news was in; the comet chaser was awake.
"It was a huge moment. We were ready, we could now go and explore this amazing comet," said McCaughrean.
What happened next -- the arrival of Rosetta, the incredible pictures it sent back and the landing of the Philae probe -- made international news. But to help the 12 to 18-year-olds visualise how hard it was to land Philae on 67P he said, "It's exactly like throwing a dart onto a dart board, to scale [from a distance of more than 20 feet]. To hit the comet at all would be getting on the board. But we were aiming for the inner ring."
Then, to show how weak the gravity on 67P is and demonstrate how slowly Philae travelled, he told everyone to stand up and jump 4 centimetres high. "Well done you have reached the escape velocity on 67P," he said as the audience jumped.
Next September -- when Rosetta is due to go into hibernation again -- the ESA researchers won't put it to sleep, but will attempt to land the spacecraft on 67P, McCaughrean said.
McCaughrean and his team have decided to try and land Rosetta on the surface of the comet, after its companion explorer Philae ended up bouncing down a canyon. Luckily Rosetta is small enough to land on the 4km-wide comet, but it's not small. The spacecraft that's travelled a perpendicular 300 million km over a decade has the same wingspan as an Airbus A320.
"Comets are the leftovers from the start of the solar system," McCaughrean said. "A treasure chest to our understanding of the origins of the solar system and of human beings."
McCaughrean also admitted that he was behind the "mysterious" image of a Pyramid on 67P that circulated in the press. He wanted to show the size of the comet to scale, but realised he couldn't release it from the ESA -- so he leaked it.
McCaughrean and his team at the ESA have an exciting, but tough year ahead. Hopefully the dart will hit the board again and Rosetta will land on 67P's surface -- without ricocheting down a cliff.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
