Thiruvananthapuram: The asteroid Monica Grady is “small, a long way away and not hazardous”, said Monica Grady, after whom the International Astronomical Union named it. She was not afraid to make fun of anything dear to herself, including European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta Mission which she was part of. The self-deprecatory humour kept popping up during the lecture ‘Landing on a Comet’ at the Kerala State Science and Technology Museum (KSSTM), organised by the British Council, Breakthrough Science Society, Astronomical Society of India, Aastro and KSSTM.
While NASA had dubbed the descent of Mars Rover from the top of the atmosphere of Mars to the surface of the planet as ‘seven minutes of terror’, Monica said, “If NASA can do something, ESA can do it better. They had seven minutes of terror. We had seven hours of boredom.” She was speaking about the day when the space probe Rosetta was about to land on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenkov; something which scientists had been working on for two decades.
In order to help the audience understand how long ago it was, she showed handwritten notes by one of the mission’s principal investigators Ian Wright (also her husband), and said “this was before ‘power point’ came into being.” She later went on to say that since the timeline was spread over so many years, ideally someone who was 10, 12 or 20 now, should start working on astronomy.
Scientists believed that studying comets, made of the same kind of compounds as earth and sun millions of years ago, would help understand earth’s origin story. She shared the readings from Ptolemy, a mass spectrometer which Ian’s team had designed, to collect data from the comet surface. One of the compounds found on the comet was polyoxylmethylene, a polymer which has connections with RNA, according to Monica. Rosetta continued giving data for 786 days, after which ESA decided to let go of it. “There was a hardly a dry eye on that day,” said Monica.
