On November 12, 2014, the world remained in suspense to follow the seven hours of terror that marked the first landing on a comet of a man-made vehicle: it was Philae, the lander of the Rosetta mission launched by the European Space Agency (Esa) to study a ‘fossil’ of the Solar System, comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Also on board the lander is the Sd2 drill designed and built in Italy (by Leonardo, with the contribution of the Politecnico di Milano) to drill and analyze the surface of the space stone, which just tonight, seven years after the historic accometage, returned the visit greeting the Earth from a close range of 61 million kilometers.
The result of the collaboration between the space agencies of Germany (DLR), France (Cnes) and Italy (ASI), the Philae lander left the Kourou base in French Guiana on 2 March 2004 on board an Ariane 5 rocket. and underwent a 10-year journey through space ’embraced’ by the Rosetta spacecraft. The two, having reached the vicinity of comet 67P, then separated: Rosetta studied the comet by circling it, while the lander launched a thrilling descent on its surface. Due to a problem with the anchors, Philae bounced three times, hovering in a crevasse without the necessary light to power her solar panels. After two days of activity, once the battery power ran out, the lander fell asleep and fell into hibernation. After more than six months he woke up and communications with Rosetta resumed in fits and starts, until the last contact in July 2015. Philae’s mission officially ended in July 2016, after a year of mysterious silence. Despite the unexpected events, the lander managed to complete many of the set tasks, sending the collected scientific data to Earth and providing valuable information for the study of comets. Even his ‘tumble’ proved to be providential, because it allowed to collect unexpected data thanks to which it was discovered that comet 67P does not have a magnetic field.
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Source From: Ansa
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