Rosetta mission set for launch
Posted: Tue, Feb 24, 2004, 8:49 PM ET (0149 GMT)
Rosetta, ESA's ambitious mission to rendezvous with and land on a comet, is on track for a launch early Thursday. Rosetta is scheduled for launch at 2:36 am EST (0736 GMT) on an Ariane 5 booster from Kourou, French Guiana. The spacecraft, composed of an orbiter and a lander named Philae, will spend ten years traveling through the solar system, adjusting its trajectory through a series of flybys — three of Earth and one of Mars — before reaching the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta will then spend more than a year studying the comet and deploying Philae to land on the surface of the comet's nucleus. Rosetta was scheduled to launch in January 2003 on a mission to another comet, Wirtanen, but the launch was delayed to allow time to investigate an Ariane 5 launch failure in December 2002. The delay meant the spacecraft missed its narrow launch window, requiring ESA to redesign the mission to visit another comet.
Rosetta, ESA's ambitious mission to rendezvous with and land on a comet, is on track for a launch early Thursday. Rosetta is scheduled for launch at 2:36 am EST (0736 GMT) on an Ariane 5 booster from Kourou, French Guiana. The spacecraft, composed of an orbiter and a lander named Philae, will spend ten years traveling through the solar system, adjusting its trajectory through a series of flybys — three of Earth and one of Mars — before reaching the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta will then spend more than a year studying the comet and deploying Philae to land on the surface of the comet's nucleus. Rosetta was scheduled to launch in January 2003 on a mission to another comet, Wirtanen, but the launch was delayed to allow time to investigate an Ariane 5 launch failure in December 2002. The delay meant the spacecraft missed its narrow launch window, requiring ESA to redesign the mission to visit another comet.| <<previous article | next article>> |
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