James Bullen reports that if the launch of the Rosetta mission had gone as planed back in 2004, we would never have heard of comet 67P - Churyumov - Gerasimenko. Instead, we would be talking about a comet called 46P - Wirtanen.But the launch was delayed by four days and 46P - Wirtanen missed its chance to be the most studied comet of all time.
Luckily, 67P had what was needed ... it was a short-period comet that loops around the Sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Earth once every 6.6 years. And it was going to be in the right place, at the right time to rendezvous with Rosetta.
When the mission began scientists knew very little about 67P, which was first discovered in 1969, other than that it was about four kilometres in diameter and traveled at a speed of about 135,000 kilometres per hour. Twelve years later, data sent back by Rosetta and its probe Philae from 67P has drastically reshaped the way scientists think about comets. And the work is just beginning for astronomers, it will take years to get through the huge amounts of data sent back.
Scientists always suspected that comets may have aided in the creation of life on Earth and Rosetta helped them confirm it. During the early years of the solar system, when cometary bombardments were more common, astronomers believe comets carrying organic compounds crashed into Earth, seeding future life.
If scientists could find the building blocks of life on a comet out in space, it would lend weight to the notion they helped kick-start life on our planet.
The discovery of these elements, these complex carbon molecules, was the primary goal of the mission and Rosetta and Philae massively succeeded in confirming that, said Warwick Holmes, who worked as an avionics engineer on the European Space Agency Rosetta project. Using its onboard instruments, Rosetta made repeated detections of glycine, an amino acid and phosphorus, two of the most critical substances necessary to the creation of life.
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