KOUROU, French Guiana, March 2, 2004 - Europe's Rosetta space mission, which aims to chase and land on a comet to try to unlock the mysteries of the solar system, blasted-off aboard an Ariane rocket from French Guiana on Tuesday, space officials said.
The rocket departed from the European Space Agency's (ESA) launch centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America at 4.17 a.m. (0717 GMT) on the first stage of a seven-billion-kilometre, 10-year journey to reach the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
No existing rocket is powerful enough to send the spacecraft directly to its destination so Rosetta will swing around Mars and the Earth several times, picking up momentum like a slingshot before breaking free and hurtling off.
In mid-2014, the spacecraft will enter the comet's orbit, brake and eventually drop a lander on to its nucleus.
"Once we've launched Rosetta from the Ariane-5 launch vehicle we have to try and get the spacecraft out into the same orbit as the comet," said John Ellwood, Rosetta mission director. "This is not such an easy thing to do. In order to get the energy to do that we actually have to fly by the planets. We fly by Earth three times, we fly by Mars once. Each time we go around one of these planets we get more and more energy," he said.
The mission, named after the stone that helped archaeologists decrypt Egyptian hieroglyphics, is slated to end in December 2015.
Two launch attempts last week were cancelled due to bad weather and technical problems. The Ariane-5 rocket lit up the partly cloudy equatorial night sky and was visible from the ground for over a minute.
It is scheduled to fly for over two hours before its upper stage re-ignites and then releases the Rosetta spacecraft.
Scientists believe comets may contain chemical and physical records from the time the solar system was formed some 4.6 billion years ago. The Rosetta mission will attempt to discover the secrets of how life began on earth - and perhaps even elsewhere in the universe.
"This mission will attempt to see material that dates from the formation of the solar system," said Phillipe Kletzkine, ESA's lead scientist for Rosetta's comet-landing probe.
"Comets are small masses far from the sun in a sort of deep freezer. For four and a half billion years they have been kept in deep freeze. The importance of this mission to identify and analyze this material, as it was during the formation of our planet and at the beginning of life," Kletzkine said.
What Will You Be doing In mid-2014?..... ;D
Dave
