Live streaming: first ever landing on a comet
Be part of history in the making as the European Space Agency will try and land a tiny spacecraft on a comet tonight at 18:00 South African time.
According to NASA Spaceflight the European Space Agency’s Rosetta – and her companion spacecraft – Philae – have parted ways, ahead of a historic landing on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday.
Philae is heading for a landing site named Agilkia, following a selection process that was conducted after Rosetta completed the 10 year journey to rendezvous with the comet.
The Rosetta mission began atop of an Ariane 5G rocket, launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou on March 2, 2004.
Today marks the historic day as a distance of 800 million kilometers from the Sun was traveled, the spacecraft took in an orbit of Jupiter, passing by Earth three times and Mars once, while also flying past two asteroids.
Should Philae successfully land, it will obtain the first images ever taken on the surface of a comet and it will make the first in-situ analysis of the composition by drilling into the surface.
Once on the surface, Philae will transmit data from the surface about the comet’s composition, with the focus on elemental, isotopic, molecular and mineralogical composition of the cometary material, along with the the characterization of physical properties of the surface and subsurface material, the large-scale structure and the magnetic and plasma environment of the nucleus.
Philae will be only the second human-made object to land on a cosmic body far from Earth. It will follow the Huygens probe that landed on Saturn’s moon Titan, 1.3 billion kilometers from Earth, in January 2005.
Don’t miss out on watching this historical event happening live here:
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