We live in incredible times and while this has nothing to do with blown hemi enignes, hot rodding, or lighting up the scoreboards with the lowest elapsed times, it does have to do with the highest level of technology that human beings have achieved in our existence. Today at about 11:00 Pacific time a European spacecraft will (hopefully) land on the nucleus of a comet and literally dig itself in. Once secured the craft will broadcast images and video back to Earth along with scientific data regarding the makeup of the comet and other info to help scientists work out how things came to be on our planet millions of years ago. It is an incredible feat to consider, let alone to be able to watch from your living room couch or office chair.
To consider how massive this moment is, the craft left Earth in 2004. For 10 years it has been in space whipping around and slowly but surely working its way into the right trajectory to hook up with this comet. Since August, the craft called Rosetta has been riding around with the comet waiting for the right moment to launch a 220lb called Philae. So let’s just review something that even Jules Verne himself could not have conjured from his own fertile mind back in the day. 10 years ago a rocket shot into space carrying a craft called Rosetta. Said craft launched into the outer reaches of space with the hopes of catching up to a comet. It did that. Now this thing is going to pace the comet and launch a cub craft that will then land on the comet and beam all sort of good information back to Earth? Incredible, right? Maybe more incredible is that this is a complete suicide mission for Philae because the comet is on a collision course with the sun. It’ll be a bit of a slow motion collision and Philae will have plenty of time to get is work done before being turned into a molten puddle by the dying star that gives life to our planet.
The fact that they have gotten this far with the mission is a mind blower to us and if they pull off the landing successfully it will be the first time that any sort of human made craft will have landed on a comet. Broadcasting information back to us Earthlings is a technological icing on the cake that we can’t even survive. The whole mission is being run by the European Space Agency and it will be a significant triumph for the human race if they pull of the landing today. The image below is a link to a live discussion that will follow the landing at 11:00 AM Pacific. We believe that images and video from the comet will be able to be seen at that time.
We know that we’ll be watching!
CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE PHOTOS AND VIDEO OF THIS AWESOME EVENT STARTING AT 11:00AM PACIFIC TIME –
Sounds cool. What sucks is that NASA didnt do it.
But Obama gave illegal aliens cheap medical insurance. 😉
Really? That’s just sad dude. How is that in any way relevant to anything? It’s almost like you had nothing better to do than wait around for any opportunity to spout your political views.
John’s wrong and off point. NASA’s mission has been moved to “Muslim outreach” under this administration.
Thanks for the link Brian, this is one of the coolest things to happen in a long time and another milestone for the human race. I love this stuff!
Not bad but not great. They did land it which is good but it bounced a couple times and none of the systems to keep it anchored on the surface worked so many of the experiments planned will not work either. So 5 out of 10.