Esa’s cool project Rosetta will be landing on a comet and orbiting it in 2014. The comet, called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (these Russians…) will be gradually getting closer to the sun. The spacecraft will study the composition of the comet’s tail, and will land a little module called Philae on the the comet’s surface. Communicating by radio waves with the spacecraft, which will then send the data collected to Earth, astronomers think that this mission will help reveal the secrets of the formation of the solar system, through the study of a comet’s core.

Just as the mission is named Rosetta after the stone that helped us decipher hieroglyphs, the landing module was named Philae thanks to a contest held by Esa to try and find the best name for it. Philae is the name of a Nile island on which an obelisk was found which helped us understand how the rosetta stone worked and what it meant.

Using the so called gravitational “sling effect”, the Rosetta spacecraft is currently gathering speed after its initial launch in 2004, to be at exactly the same speed as the comet when it’ll approach it. On November 13, Rosetta flew by Earth, and took interesting shots of our planet and the Moon. This is one of many past and future “fly-by”s. Hoping that the mission will give us as much detail as possible and clues on the origin of the solar system, there’s only one thing to wish: Good Luck Rosetta!
Clement