Preparing for the end of a special space f light
FOR almost a year, the Philae lander has sat quietly alone on a comet, hurtling through the uncharted solitude of space. It will not be lonely much longer.
Rosetta, the little box’s mother ship, will pull out of its orbit around Comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko and join Philae on the space rock’s surface next September, scientists have announced.
Philae made history last November by successfully landing on a moving comet. Now, as the fuel reserves of its mother ship dwindle and it pulls further away on the other side of the Sun, the probe is nearing the end of its useful life.
It is time for Rosetta to go into that good night, but its last descent is likely to be anything but gentle. Guiding a spacecraft with no landing gear down on to a comet travelling at 135,000kmh will be even more difficult than Philae’s haphazard landing last November, according to Patrick Martin, the mission manager at the European Space Agency.
‘‘The idea is not really to land, because I very much doubt we can control the spacecraft to the end, but rather to settle on the surface for the end of the mission,’’ he said.
In August the comet reached its perihelion, the closest point in its orbit to the Sun, and by the middle of next year it will be more than three times as far from the centre of the solar system as Earth is. By late next year, Rosetta will be obscured by the Sun, effectively cutting off the radio link with its pilots.
However, in its remaining months the spacecraft will continue to beam back observations about the comet for scientists to examine.
Rosetta’s masters will be sad to see it go.
‘‘Definitely, it’s a loss,’’ Martin said. ‘‘We’ve passed perihelion now, which means we are on our way to the end of the mission. But we still have a lot of exciting science to do.’’