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Europeans to launch ``comet chaser'' space mission after lengthy

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 February 2004, 06:00 CST

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- European scientists were set to launch a spacecraft Thursday in an unprecedented attempt to land a probe on a comet, an effort that could yield new discoveries about the solar system and the origins of life on Earth.

The European Space Agency's 3-ton (6,600-pound) Rosetta probe was due to blast off on an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, early Thursday morning.

After a 10-year journey, the probe will orbit and study an ice-caked comet called 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko, and investigate comets' role in the evolution of the solar system.

Previously, spacecraft have made only brief fly-bys of comets to take pictures and have landed only on asteroids.

Project head Gerhard Schwehm said comets are believed to contain matter left over from the birth of the sun and planets, since most comets formed at the same as the solar system -- about 4.6 billion year ago.

``Over this long period of time they have preserved the material, like in a deep freeze,'' Schwehm told Germany's ZDF television. ``They have hardly changed, and are the last chance we have to access witnesses of the origins of the solar system.''

The Ç1 billion (US$1.25 billion) mission will send Rosetta on two excursions into the solar system's main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. The craft will make a roundabout route, swinging through the gravitational fields of Earth and Mars during several fly-bys, picking up speed before heading into deep space.

In May 2014, the craft is scheduled to rendezvous with 67P/Churymov-Gerasimenko and go into orbit. Six months later, the probe will send a box-shaped lander onto the comet's surface as it speeds through the solar system at 135,000 kph (83,600 mph).

The lander is designed to touch down softly on three shock-absorbing legs, then fire a harpoon to anchor it to the ground of the tiny comet, which has almost no gravitational pull.

Rosetta carries 11 other instruments that will send detailed information about the comet's composition and the effects of the sun on its surface. The lander carries nine experiments of its own and a drill to take subsurface samples.

Named for the Rosetta Stone tablet that helped historians decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, the project is also groundbreaking in that it relies on solar panels for power, in contrast to other, nuclear-powered deep space missions.

Originally scheduled to launch in January 2003, Rosetta was delayed after problems with the rocket forced scientists to retarget the craft, originally due to be sent to a comet called Wirtanen.

Since comets pelted the earth in the billion years after the solar system formed, scientists theorize that they may also have brought some of the building blocks for life, like water and organic materials.

Scientists will be monitoring the liftoff from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, south of Frankfurt.

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