The Rosetta Mission was initially approved in November 1993 as a Cornerstone Mission in ESA's Horizons 2000.
Since then, scientists and engineers from all over Europe and the United States gathered together for the analysis of an ice world; that is the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The launch was originally scheduled for January 2003, but the travel was postponed for March 2004 because of a failure of an Ariane rocket.
This travel lasted ten years; it crossed the Solar System, the asteroid belt and travelled into the deep space. Rosetta spacecraft measures 32 meters long, it’s the length of 3 London buses. Since its launch, the Rosetta has travelled further than the height of 67 billion Elizabeth Towers or 740 million times of the Mount Everest.
The name comes from the famous Rosetta Stone. Simultaneously, Philae is the name of a city in Egypt, in which we found an obelisk. This stone and this obelisk were the key to understand the hieroglyph and therefore the civilization of ancient Egypt.
Similarly, the Rosetta spacecraft will unlock the mysteries of the comets.
Philae has been landed in the comet the 12th November 2014. More than a year will spend before the mission end: in December 2015. This mission has revolutionized the space trip, because of its records:
- Rosetta has been the first spacecraft to orbit a comet’s nucleus.
- It has been the first spacecraft to fly alongside a comet as it heads towards the inner Solar System.
- Rosetta has been the first spacecraft to examine from close proximity how a frozen comet is transformed by the warmth of the Sun.
- The Rosetta lander’s instruments have obtained the first images from a comet’s surface and have made the first analysis to find out what it is made of.
- Rosetta has passed through the main asteroid belt, with the option to be the first European close encounter with one or more of these primitive objects.
- Rosetta has been the first spacecraft ever to fly close to Jupiter’s orbit using solar cells as its main power source.