Spaced Out: Hollywood Is Good, But Philae/Rosetta Is Better

Go to the local multiplex and catch the latest Hollywood space spectacular, Interstellar or stay home and check out the feeds from the European Space Agency's Philae/Rosetta mission?

For many people, reality is beating fantasy.

This is not your grand parents' space mission with pipe-smoking engineers speaking in techno-babble for the uninitiated.

This is 2014. Philae has its own Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Friend your intergalactic probe today!

Superficialities aside, one of the unintended findings from the Philae/Rosetta program is that people have not lost their sense of wonder and excitement at the real-life accomplishments of their own species and the technology they are able to employ. That's probably worth the price of investment right there. JL

Clive Cookson reports in the Financial Times:

Space agency bosses realise that the public – and their political paymasters – appreciate spectaculars such as Rosetta/Philae more as feats of engineering with immediate “gee whizz” drama than for what often seem rather vague long-term scientific pay-offs.
Its battery is in danger of dying and its exact location remained a mystery last night, as the fate of Philae , the European space probe perched precariously on the head of a comet half a billion kilometres away, turned into a real life cliffhanger. The story of the Rosetta mission has fired the world’s imagination and captivated viewers. As David Parker, head of the UK Space Agency, put it: “Hollywood is good but Rosetta is better.”First we had Wednesday’s drama of Philae’s daring descent from its Rosetta mother ship. We celebrated its making radio contact to announce its arrival on comet 67P – and then suffered the anguish of discovering that the probe did not land properly, because its harpoons failed to secure it to the surface, and had bounced back up and down, ending up jammed in a rocky corner against a cliff of dirty ice.

Exhausted scientists at the European Space Agency control centre in Germany spent Friday trying to sort out some of Philae’s woes over a discontinuous radio link with each message taking 28 minutes to travel out from Earth.

The probe’s battery is fading because it is lying in deep shade and little of the expected sunshine is falling on its solar panels. Even the exact location of Philae on the 4km-wide nucleus of 67P is uncertain; it has not been spotted by cameras on the mothership though mission controllers hope to triangulate its position by examining radio transmissions with Rosetta.

Philae has attempted to drill into the comet’s surface to extract material for chemical analysis in its onboard robotic laboratory, despite fears that the pressure could topple it over.

Whatever the problems, ESA scientists portray the Philae landing and the broader Rosetta mission as a triumph. “This mission is already fantastic,” says Andrea Accomazzo, flight director. “What we have achieved is unique and will be unique forever.”

ESA, an independent international organisation with 20 member states, decided to invest €1.3bn in Rosetta primarily because the mission promised a good scientific return. Although comets have been objects of mystery and wonder since ancient times, modern researchers value them most as repositories of material left little changed from the formation of the solar system 4.5bn years ago.

At the same time space agency bosses realise that the public – and their political paymasters – appreciate spectaculars such as Rosetta/Philae more as feats of engineering with immediate “gee whizz” drama than for what often seem rather vague long-term scientific pay-offs.
ESA has learnt from the famed PR machine of Nasa, its older and larger US counterpart, how to milk a mission for maximum excitement.

One trick is to anthropomorphise the spacecraft, giving robotic missions some of the appeal of manned space flight. Social media help. Today’s craft have Twitter accounts and tweet messages. “The view is absolutely breathtaking, ESA_Rosetta! Unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Philae told its 320,000 Twitter followers on Wednesday.

For Philae’s perilous descent on to the comet’s craggy surface of dirty ice and rocks, ESA warned people to expect “seven hours of terror” – a phrase borrowed from the “seven minutes of terror” used by Nasa to describe the 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars.
Indeed Jim Green, Nasa’s head of planetary science, was fully involved in the Rosetta drama when he visited mission headquarters in Darmstadt for the landing: “How audacious, how exciting, how unbelievable to be able to dare to land on a comet!” he exclaimed.
A comet such as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (to give its full name) has spent virtually all its life deep frozen in the outer reaches of the solar system, hardly changed in 4.5bn years. By studying it close up, scientists will learn more about the chemical ingredients that made up the young Earth.

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European space probe lands on comet

Clive Cookson, FT science editor, asked space scientist Ken Pounds what the Rosetta mission may reveal about the history of the solar system.

For example if the isotopes of oxygen in the comet’s ice are identical to those in Earth’s oceans, it will support the theory that an early bombardment by comets delivered vast amounts of water to the new planet. If organic molecules such as amino acids are present in 67P, that would suggest that comets brought some of the building blocks of life to Earth, furthering our understanding of how biology began.

“The data collected by Rosetta will provide the scientific community, and the world, with a treasure-trove of data,” says John Grunsfeld, Nasa’s space science director. “Small bodies in our solar system like comets and asteroids help us understand how the solar system formed and provide opportunities to advance exploration.”
Stephan Ulamec, Philae manager, says that even if the drilling does not work, the probe’s other instruments will have gathered 80 per cent of the scientific data expected from the lander. For example, it has been “sniffing” molecules in 67P’s thin atmosphere to characterise their chemistry. But it may take researchers many months or even years to analyse and publish the results.
When European governments originally put together ESA in 1973 it was tiny in budget and technical capabilities compared with Nasa, then winding down from the glory days of the Apollo programme but investing heavily in space science. Even today Nasa outspends its European counterpart by a factor of more than three, with a budget of about $17bn a year compared to $5.5bn for ESA.
The US agency set the bar high for unmanned exploration in 1976 with the two Viking landings on Mars, which provided the first close-up view of another planet. ESA showed its prowess 10 years later with the 1986 Giotto mission which whizzed past Halley’s comet, giving our first views of the “dirty snowball” nucleus at the heart of a comet.
Its most glorious moment before Rosetta came in 2005 when its Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s giant moon Titan and sent back remarkable pictures of an alien world on which hydrocarbons create weather like water does on Earth. That remains the only touchdown of a man-made object on a body in the outer solar system.
While ESA is visiting comets, Nasa is more interested in asteroids – rocky bodies of various sizes rotating around the sun in more stable and circular orbits than comets, which swoop in from deep space.
Mr Grunsfeld says Nasa will build on Rosetta’s success through its Osiris-Rex mission. This is due to launch a spacecraft in 2016 to an asteroid called Bennu, where it will grab a sample in 2019 – the first time this has been done on an extraterrestrial body apart from the moon.
According to Nasa the motivation for the mission goes beyond scientific curiosity. “Bennu is also one of the most potentially hazardous asteroids,” it says. “It has a relatively high probability of impacting the Earth late in the 22nd century. Osiris-Rex will determine Bennu’s physical and chemical properties. This will be critical for future scientists to know when developing an impact mitigation mission.”
ESA meanwhile is looking to Mars for its next space visit after Rosetta. Its previous attempt to land a probe on the red planet, the UK-led Beagle 2, failed in 2003. The agency will be hoping for a better result in January 2019 when its ExoMars rover attempts a landing. Unlike Nasa’s Curiosity rover, ExoMars has been designed with specialist analytical equipment to detect signs of primitive microbial life on Mars.
Beyond that lies Juice, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, scheduled for launch in 2022 and arrival at the solar system’s biggest planet in 2030. There it will spend three years wandering around the Jovian lunar system, looking down at fascinating bodies such as the icy moon Europa whose crust is believed to cover a liquid ocean that might harbour primitive lifeforms. Although astrobiologists would love to add a probe to the mission that would land on Europa and sample the ice, sadly neither ESA nor Nasa can afford to spend the $1bn-$2bn it would cost.
Available funds have to be spent not only on direct physical exploration of the solar system but also on orbiting observatories that can see far further into space – indeed to the edges of the universe – free from the dusty distortions of Earth’s atmosphere.
For the immediate future, however, space scientists are focusing their attention on that plucky little probe sitting at an awkward angle on the head of comet 67P. Whatever Philae’s fate, mission scientists are desperate for the world to see the landing as a success.
As Jean-Pierre Bibring, lead scientist for Philae, says: “What’s really impressive here is not the degree of failure [of the landing system] but the degree of success. It is amazing where we are. We are at the limit of what humankind could do.”