Despite well-reported problems with the Rosetta Philae lander's landing hooks, a Laurentian University professor says it's important to understand just how monumental an achievement it is that humans were able to land on a moving comet.
David Pearson says it surpasses even the moon landing in terms of difficulty – and far surpasses it in terms of the precision and planning needed to pull it off.
“It's a Nobel Prize winning achievement,” Pearson said Tuesday. “This is totally extraordinary. It equals any scientific achievement I'm aware of. I mean, (Rosetta) has been travelling for 10 years – 10 years — Imagine if they had been off even by half a kilometre (in their calculations).”
He compared it to the launch of the Hubble telescope in the 1980s, which has become a success, but at first was a major disappointment because a miscalculation in the curvature of the lens had to be addressed.
There was no such correction possible with the the Philae lander, which travelled a cumulative distance of 6.4 billion kilometres in its circular route to align with the orbit of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Comets travel at about 30 to 40 kilometres a second – fast enough to get from Sudbury to Toronto in about 15 seconds.
“It's incredible that they were able to land on something moving that fast, and about the size of Ramsey Lake,” Pearson said.
Comets are commonly described as massive dirty space snowballs, and are created when stars explode, sending materials into space. The heavier materials eventually clump together and make new stars and solar systems, while the lighter, gaseous compounds end up farther away, freezing, and, eventually, orbiting the new sun, changing trajectory as they come close to the gravity of planets also orbiting the sun.
Larger, heavier comets crash into planets, and many scientists believe the Sudbury basin could have been the result of a comet, rather than a large asteroid. That could also mean that much of the water in Northern Ontario came from melting ice from the comet, although Pearson said there is no consensus on that.
“It is possible,” he said. “So the water I'm looking at right now, Ramsey Lake, a good deal of that water could have arrived on the Earth from comets.”
Comet 67P is about four kilometres in size and is about 4.6 billion years old, compared to the estimated 13.8 billion years scientists estimate have passed since the creation of the universe.
Dr. Fraser Duncan is associate director with SNOLAB in Sudbury, where cutting-edge research involves the search for dark matter scientists believe was present at the inception of the universe.
While Rosetta's work involves travelling into the vast expanse of space, SNOLAB is looking for proof of matter that is almost indescribably small.
But both projects are efforts to better understand how our universe was created and evolved since the Big Bang, Fraser said, even if the events are more than nine billion years apart.
“Both are certainly complimentary – Rosetta is looking for evidence about the formation of the solar system, and we're looking at the formation of the universe itself,” he said.
“So we're looking at the earliest moments of the universe, and how it led to the formation of stars and galaxies. And Rosetta is looking at how that formation resulted in our solar system. The analogy is, Rosetta is looking at the leftover bits left at the construction site of a house. You find leftover drywall and a bit of paint that tells you what the house is going to look like.”
And both projects require years of planning, construction and incredibly precise calculations, before you start getting any information. And if the calculations are off even by a tiny amount, the results are in jeopardy.
Pearson said data from the mission could show that the basic building blocks of life could have come from comets.
“It would be the ingredients that would go into an organic soup that could eventually form bigger and more interesting molecules,” he said.
While the hard landing and failure of the land hooks to deploy has meant the lander isn't getting enough sun to quickly charge its battery, scientists are already getting a trove of data – including Tuesday's announcement that organic molecules may have been detected, Pearson said.
And what was a mishap could turn out to a stroke of luck in disguise. As Comet 67P continues its orbit around and moves much closer to the sun in the coming months, there's a good chance it will get enough light to recharge its battery. And at that point, the world could be witness to the sight of geysers shooting off the comet's surface, as the areas of the ice melt sprays into the expanse of space.
“Gases are released from the surface when they get closer to the sun,” Pearson said. “It would be incredible. So it may be that the little problem turns out to be a blessing. We would get data coming back from two very different parts of the comet's orbit. And that would be fantastic.”
Sweet Rosetta:
The European Space Agency mission Rosetta Stone left the Earth in March 2004 on a 12-year mission to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk and collect data.
It circled the sun four times, using gravity from Earth and Mars to give it momentum as it aligned with Comet 67P, travelling a total of 6.4 billion km in the process.
Comets are thought to contain the raw building blocks of the universe.
It's possible the Sudbury Basin was created from the impact of a comet, rather than an asteroid, and is the source of much of the water in our local lakes.
Source: www.esa.int.
