Rosetta Spacecraft Mission Update
Although meteorological conditions badly disrupted travel in the city on the day of the seminar, a very interested and involved audience travelled across London to hear about the Rosetta mission and its 10-year journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from two very knowledgeable and engaging speakers. First, Dr Paolo Ferri from ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Germany gave a presentation entitled ‘Rosetta – how to catch a Comet’ in which he described the mission operations challenges, with particular emphasis on the difficulties of orbiting the comet nucleus. Secondly, Dr Mark Bentley from the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences gave a presentation on ‘A snapshot of the science from Rosetta’ which contained an overview of the science findings…