Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Watch ESA's Rosetta spacecraft send a lander to a comet — live


For more than ten years, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft has been in pursuit of the same 2.5-mile-wide comet, with the somewhat unwieldy name of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (Ed. note: Scientists, I am available at a very reasonable fee to name your discoveries things that people will actually remember). Starting at 2PT ET today, the ESA will be streaming the attempt at a historic first: landing a human-made object on a comet. This isn't the first contact with a comet, though; in 2005 NASA slammed a comet with its Deep Impact probe, which was destroyed in the process.


The goal of today's mission is to get a probe called Philae from the Rosetta craft to the surface of the comet. That journey should take about seven hours....


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