[meteorite-list] How to Land on a Comet

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 12:28:21 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201411062028.sA6KSLZi019543_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/03nov_rosettalanding/

How to Land on a Comet
NASA Science News
November 3, 2014

Generally speaking, space missions fall into one of three
categories: difficult, more difficult, and ridiculously difficult.

Flybys are difficult. A spaceship travels hundreds of millions of
miles through the dark void of space, pinpoints a distant planet or
moon, and flies past it at 20 to 30 thousand mph, snapping pictures
furiously during an achingly brief encounter.

Going into orbit is more difficult. Instead of flying past its target,
the approaching spaceship brakes, changing its velocity by just the
right amount to circle the planet. One wrong move and the spacecraft
bounces off the atmosphere, becoming an unintended meteor.

Landing is ridiculously difficult. Just play NASA's "Seven Minutes
of Terror" video. Watching Curiosity parachute, retrorocket, and
sky-crane its way to the surface of Mars rarely fails to produce
goosebumps. Since the Space Age began, the space agencies of Earth have
succeeded in landing on only six bodies: Venus, Mars, the Moon, Titan,
and asteroids 433 Eros and Itokawa.

A new ScienceCast video previews the first-ever landing on a comet. Play
it <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5iyZTXiX78&feature=youtu.be>

In a move that could set a new standard for difficulty, the European
Space Agency is about to add a seventh member to the list. On Nov. 12th
ESA's Rosetta spacecraft will drop a lander named "Philae" onto the
surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

"How hard is this landing?" asks Art Chmielewski, the US Rosetta Project
Manager at JPL. "Consider this: The comet will be moving 40 times faster
than a speeding bullet, spinning, shooting out gas and welcoming Rosetta
on the surface with boulders, cracks, scarps and possibly meters of dust!"

Rosetta will drop Philae from a height of 22 km as the comet rotates
freely below. No active steering will take place during the slow descent.

"Unlike previous landings, where reconnaissance had been done
beforehand--at Mars, for instance, we mapped the planet well in
advance - Rosetta just started learning about its target a couple of
months ago," explains Claudia Alexander, Project Scientist for the U.S.
Rosetta Project. "This introduces much more risk."

Rosetta arrived at 67P on August 6, 2014. What it found was shocking.
The comet's nucleus is strangely shaped, (one observer has likened it to
a "freak-show mushroom") dominated by a pair of mile-wide "knobs" joined
by a boulder-strewn "neck." Picking a landing site would not be easy.

Rosetta spent more than a month surveying the comet before engineers and
scientists gathered in France to make their decision.

"None of the candidate landing sites met all of the operational criteria
at the 100% level," says Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager at the
German Aerospace Center (DLR), "but Site J is clearly the best solution."

Site J is a relatively flat, boulder-free location on the smaller of the
comet's knobs. It gets plenty of sunlight for the lander's solar panels
and has good line-of-sight visibility for communications with Rosetta
orbiting overhead.

The descent will take about 7 hours, a drawn-out process that could be
enlivened by unpredictable jets of gas emerging from the comet's core.

You thought 7 minutes of terror was bad? "This will be Seven Hours of
Terror," says Alexander.

If all goes well, Philae will touch down at walking pace and deploy
harpoons to fasten itself to the crusty surface. A suite of 10 sensors
on the lander, including a drill for sample collection and an acoustic
sounder to probe the comet's sub-surface structure, can then begin an
unprecedented study of a comet at point-blank range.

"A comet is unlike any other planetary body that we've attempted to land
on," says Alexander. "Getting Philae down successfully will be an
incredible achievement for humankind!"

Try your hand at landing a spacecraft on a comet with NASA Space
Place's Comet Quest: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/comet-quest/

Credits:

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips
Production editor: Dr. Tony Phillips
Credit: Science at NASA
Received on Thu 06 Nov 2014 03:28:21 PM PST