Paris: The space probe Rosetta on Wednesday made a historic rendezvous with a comet, climaxing a 10-year, six-billion-kilometre chase through the Solar System, the European Space Agency said.
“We’re at the comet,” Rosetta’s flight operations manager, Sylvain Lodiot, declared in a webcast from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.
It marks the first time a spacecraft has been sent into orbit around a comet, a wanderer of the Solar System whose primeval dust and ice may hold insights into how the planets formed.
In November, a robot scientific lab called Philae will be sent down to the surface to make the first-ever landing on a comet. Rosetta's rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was confirmed at 9.29 am at distance of 400 million km from Earth, according to signals received at ground stations.
ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain hailed the fruit of 20 years’ work to design, build and launch the three-tonne craft and then steer it to a tiny target in deep space. “It makes 2014 the year of Rosetta,” he said.
“Rosetta is a unique mission, unique by its scientific goal,” Mr Dordain said. “Understanding our origins is certainly the best way to understand our future.”
On its Twitter page, the Rosetta mission said “Hello, comet!” in the languages of the agency’s 20 nations. “It’s a historic meeting and a great first in world science, which the global space community has been awaiting for a decade,” said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of France’s National Centre for Space Research, a major contributor to the project.
