It is an unprecedented astronomical event . More than 500 million kilometers from Earth, located between the orbit of Jupiter and that of Mars, the Philae module of the Rosetta spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA) will descend on the surface of a comet, specifically Comet 67P / Churyumov – Gerasimenko. More than 20 years have passed since the mission received the green light at ESA in 1993 and, for 10 years, the probe has been chasing the comet, which has taken it to travel more than 6,000 million kilometers. The mission will become the first to make such close contact with a comet and the first to follow its path around the Sun. This is its timeline:
March 2, 2004 . Rosetta is launched from ESA’s space base in Kourou (French Guiana) aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.
March 4, 2005. First gravitational assist on Earth. It is a maneuver designed to use the energy of the gravitational field of a planet or satellite, the Earth in this case, to obtain an acceleration or braking of the probe and thus change its trajectory. This process occurs in 2007 and 2009.
July 10, 2010 . Fly through the asteroid Lutetia.
June 8, 2011. Enters deep space hibernation.
January 20, 2014 . The ship wakes up after months of hibernation and begins a phase of checking the state of the instruments.
May 7, 2014 . The approach maneuvers to the comet begin.
June 10, 2014. The first scientific data captured by Rosetta reaches the Earth’s bases.
August 6, 2014. Enters orbit with Comet 67P / Chury.
September 10, 2014 . Rosetta begins mapping the comet’s surface.
November 12, 2014. The most delicate day of the mission. Philae is positioned about 22 km above the comet. The Rosetta probe will detach from the Philae module at a speed of about 18 cm / s through a double system of small detonations. Then the long descent to the comet that will take 7 hours. At 100 meters away it will spread its legs and from there it will be totally autonomous. The critical moment is approximately 5:00 p.m., the moment of contact. Shortly after, the 6 cameras of the CIVA system will take a panoramic image of the landing site that they will send to Earth. From there, a three-month surface research phase will begin.
August 13, 2015. Comet and Rosetta reach perihelion, the point of travel closest to the sun at which comet activity reaches its peak of activity.
December 31, 2015. End of mission, a priori.
