Audlem Boy in Space Mission

The Mission
The European Space Agency (ESA) launched an unmanned probe Rosetta in 2004 and it arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014.
It is the first mission in history to rendezvous with a comet, escort it as it orbits the Sun, and aims to deploy a lander to its surface.

It is now circling the comet at about 5 miles distance and will continue to orbit as the comet gets nearer the sun and becomes more active.

The audacious attempt to land a small module on the comet is due on the 12th November. Radio signals take about 28 minutes to travel the hundreds of millions of miles back to Earth and the manoeuvre will take about seven hours. Confirmation of success should arrive soon after 4pm GMT on the 12th.

The mission's objectives
Rosetta's prime objective is to help understand the origin and evolution of the Solar System.

The comet is like a large freezer and has preserved the composition of the pre-solar nebula out of which the Sun and the planets of the Solar System formed, more than 4.6 billion years ago.

There is convincing evidence that comets played a key role in the evolution of the planets. Comets, for example, probably brought much of the water in today's oceans. They could even have provided the complex organic molecules that may have played a crucial role in the evolution of life on Earth.

Ritchie Kay, who grew up in Audlem, is one of the control team guiding Rosetta. He works in the ESA headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany. From Audlem school he progressed through Brine Leas and the South Cheshire College to Birmingham University and then, for his PhD, he went to Strathclyde University in Glasgow. He worked in the Space Division of Logica in Germany before joining the control team.

It will be a tense day for him and let's hope for success.

Rosetta web site http://rosetta.esa.int/

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.