Posted on 08/05/2014 9:41:44 PM PDT by BenLurkin
After a decade long chase of 6.4 billion kilometers (4 Billion miles) through interplanetary space the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft is now on final approach for its historic rendezvous with its target comet 67P scheduled for Wednesday morning, Aug. 6. some half a billion kilometers from the Sun. See online webcast below.
Rosetta arrives at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in less than 12 hours and is currently less than 200 kilometers away.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
Kool
I wondered for one moment how ted kennedy was involved.
0_o
as well as deploy the piggybacked Philae lander to its uneven surface.
I believe the scheduled “touchdown” is in November for the Philae...they may not want to disrupt anything until they get a lot of pictures and data...recorded...
Maybe they’ll find Jimmy Hoffa there?
Is NASA select airing this?
It's always that last little bit of delta V.
/johnny
It was 12 hours, earlier in the day, it now looks like it’s about 3 hours.
/johnny
Maybe they’ll find O’s real birth certificate there???
“12 hours to go 200km.
It’s always that last little bit of delta V.
/johnny”
My wife must be driving this thing. She would go that slow because she’d have to stop and ask direction every 3.5 minutes. Stop for the bathroom every 45 minutes and slow down for even the smallest flaw in the road surface
Maybe we’ll discover other life forms, so we have a reason to travel there and hit em in the head with a rock, just to see what happens....
/s
An object as small as this comet must have an extremely weak gravitational field. What's the orbital velocity? 1mph?
It’s not so much an orbit as an extended rendezvous. The Rosetta spacecraft matches velocities with the comet and hangs out over the next year and a half.
MD, who slightly works on one of Rosetta’s instruments
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