WORLD
Rosetta comet landing succeeds, capping 6.4 billion-kilometre journey
The Rosetta spacecraft has successfully landed a probe on a comet, the European Space Agency announced Wednesday.
The agency says it has received a signal from the 220-pound, washing machine-sized Philae lander after it touched down on the icy surface of the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet.
“This is a big step for civilization,” ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain said.
While further checks are needed to ascertain the state of the lander, the fact that it is resting on the surface of the speeding comet is already a huge success.
Hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, the speeding spacecraft released Philae toward the icy, dusty surface of a comet early Wednesday morning, setting off a seven-hour countdown to an audacious attempt to answer some of the biggest questions about the origin of the universe.
The scientists will be particularly excited if they find “left-handed” amino acids — so-called because they have mirror image “right-handed” forms – as those are the type which make up most of life on Earth. Finding them on a comet would not only give the strongest indication yet that we have alien ancestry, but it would show that Earth-like life could exist on other planets.
The mission received significant help from Saskatoon’s SED Systems, which built three ground stations the space agency uses to communicate with the Rosetta spacecraft.
The first tracking station was built in New Norcia, which is near Perth in Western Australia. The two others followed, in Cebreros, Spain, in 2006 and in Malargue, Argentina, in 2013.