The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Britain has contributed £70 million towards the probe’s £600 million cost, and it was partially built by the Stevenage-based satellite company EADS-Astrium. British scientists have also contributed to 11 of the 21 instruments it will fly.

Professor Ian Halliday, chief executive of the Partide Physics and Astronomy Research Council, said:

“This mission will turn science fiction into science fact. Every aspect of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko will be analysed, resulting in the most comprehensive set of scientific measurements ever obtained of a comet and the UK can be justly proud of the significant part it has played. This ground-breaking mission benefits from considerable involvement by talented scientists from UK universities.”

Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the Science Minister, said:

“It is hoped the Rosetta mission will provide us with an understanding of the origins of the Sun and the planets, including Earth. It could provide answers to how life actually began.”

Rosetta will start orbiting the comet in May 2014. Once it has identified a landing site, it will release Philae, which will hit the ground at walking speed.

Philae will drill into the comet’s core to take samples, and take close-up pictures, thus becoming the first probe to make a controlled landing on a comet. A NASA spacecraft to be launched in December, named Deep Impact, will crash into a comet in 2005, but will be destroyed in the process.

Both the European lander and orbiter will operate for more than a year, collecting information on the comet’s composition, and on the way in which its icy core starts to melt as it approaches the sun.

One British-led experiment, named Ptolemy, will analyse the chemical composition of samples from the comet’s core. If these match those found on Earth, it would be possible that water and organic materials first reached Earth on comets.

Ian Wright of the Open University, principal investigator for Ptolemy, said:

“The study of these biologically important elements is strongly implicated in our quest to understand the origin of life on Earth.”

The oldest stars ever seen

On 10 March 2004 The Times reported that the Hubble telescope has peered deeper into space than ever before to picture the Universe in the flush of youth. It had captured images of stars which are more than 76,254,048,000,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth.

Their light was generated more than 13 billion years ago, and has taken that long to reach Hubble. The light from Mars, which is at present more than 125 million miles from Earth, takes ten minutes to reach us. The images open a window on to some of the oldest objects ever seen, many of which were formed 400 million years after the Big Bang, approximately 14 billion years ago.

Masilmo Stiavelli of the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute said:

“Hubble takes us to within a stone’s throw of the Big Bang itself.”