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Ems Valley U3A astronomy group

Rosetta Project presentation

On January 9th, Dr Andrew Morse of the Open University's Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute gave a Talk to 38 members and friends on the Rosetta Mission. The purpose of this Mission is to rendezvous with a comet in 2014 and send a Lander to it. Samples will then be taken, analysed and the data sent back to the European Space Organisation.

The Open University is responsible for the mass spectrometer. There are altogether 11 instruments on the orbiter and 10 on the Lander. Comets are the earliest known remnants of the solar system and as such give clues to its formation. The comet in question is 67P C-G and was first discovered in the 19th century.

Rosetta was first launched in 2004 and Andrew went to French Guyana as an observer. A video was shown of its launch. At present the probe is in a state of hibernation with only half a billion kilometres to rendezvous in 2014. This was, of course, a professional, knowledgeable and highly enjoyable presentation and Andrew answered questions at the end.

Finally, Andrew produced duplicates of the mass spectrometer on Rosetta as well as experiments on the ill-fated Beagle 2 explorer which crash-landed on Mars.

We are extremely grateful to Dr Morse for his time and trouble and look forward to future presentations.

Tony

All pictures on this page are the property of Jeff Thatcher and are copyrighted as of the 9th of January 2012 to him.