The Rosetta probe launched the night this Thursday its slow descent towards the comet Churi, where it will crash voluntarily this Friday at noon.
A tweet from the European Space Agency confirmed that the probe was placed at the time specified on a trajectory that will lead to a collision with Churi.
The shock spectacular will put an end to a space odyssey more than twelve years, topped off with close to 26 months of closeness fruitful with the comet 67P/Churiumov-Guerasimenko in its journey around the Sun.
The probe will use his last strength to try to accumulate the largest possible amount of scientific data during these last few hours.
“we’re very excited,” said Matt Taylor, head scientist of the Rosetta mission, questioned in the European Centre of Special Operations (ESOC), in Darmstadt (Germany).
“During the final descent, we’re going to find in a region which is never collected samples,” he added.
The greater part of the instruments of the probe will be connected during the last few hours. Rosetta will take pictures very close, “suck” the gases, measure the temperature of Churi and their severity.
adopted in 1993 by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Rosetta mission aims to better understand the solar system. The comets appeared about 4 thousand 500 million years old, are part of the most primitive of this system.
The mission, which has cost a thousand 400 million euros, has allowed us to gather a harvest of data that will occupy several years to scientists.
The mission was marked by the vicissitudes of the robot-laboratory Philae, which was the first to land on a comet, on 12 November 2014. Inert since the July 2015 sold out completely its batteries, Philae was located at the beginning of September by the probe.
The comet 67P is currently directed towards the orbit of Jupiter. Will continue away from the Sun in its elliptical path, until about 850 million kilometers of distance from our star king.
And with him will walk away Rosetta, with more than 7 billion kilometres above since its launch in 2004, to escort the comet since August 2014.
Fitted with large solar panels, the probe has begun to lose power. For that reason, ESA decided to terminate its mission as the controls.
- “Wells” deep -
The drama goes through more than 720 million kilometers from the Earth.
on Thursday night, at 20:50 GMT when the probe is located 19 km from Churi, Rosetta fired the thrusters for three minutes to be placed on a trajectory that directly leads to the collision with the comet.
The confirmation was received on Earth at the end of 40 minutes. The descent of the probe should last 14 hours.
In the final part, your speed should reach 90 centimeters per second (3.2 km/h), “that is to say the speed of a walking human,” pointed out Sylvain Lodiot, responsible for operations in flight on Rosetta at ESOC.
Rosetta is not designed to land but the engineers have done everything possible to ensure that the “controlled impact” of the probe on the comet, at 10:40 GMT this Friday, be as less rude as possible.
The Earth will have to wait 40 minutes to be informed, towards 11:20 GMT, with a margin of variation of approximately 20 minutes.
The probe was scheduled to shut down in terms of contact with the surface of the comet’s nucleus.
Rosetta should it land in an area situated in the head of the comet, which involves “holes”, a few circular depressions wide and deep, from which escape is sometimes jets of gas and dust.
“we Hope to be able to observe structures in the walls of the holes (we) can be traced to the time of formation of the comet and would give us indications on the evolution of primordial solar system,” said Jean-Pierre Bibring, scientific officer of the programme Philae.
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