Cheers At UTA With Philae Lander Touchdown On Comet
Bud Gillett
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NORTH TEXAS (CBS 11 NEWS) - History was made Wednesday when the European Space Agency lander Philae separated from its space probe, Rosetta, and touched down on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The cheers could be heard even in Arlington. The comet is thought to be part of the earliest formation of our solar system.
“It makes us joyful, happy, very pleased,” said University of Texas at Arlington’s Daniel Armstrong. Tiny tubing called columns that Armstrong created in the ’90s is a critical part of the probe’s experiments. “We do research to get interesting new results and when we get them, we’re very happy,” he told CBS 11 News.
It’s historic because it’s the first time any space probe has physically touched a comet to test what’s there.
Comets are called dirty snowballs, but is the ice water or some frozen gas, like methane? Running samples through the lander’s tiny oven—with Armstong’s coiled tube column—can unlock their secrets.
The tubing’s internal diameter is just 250 microns, smaller than a human hair. “They get the sample, which was the melted comet ice, they would be able to analyze it, force the gas through the column with this comet material, and identify what the molecules are.”
Dr. Armstrong’s columns have been produced commercially for two decades, and it’s because of their dependability that they were chosen for the space mission. Armstrong didn’t even find out until the Europeans made their decision.
The Rosetta/Philae’s progress was followed throughout North Texas.
“It’s interesting to know if it’s made out of ice…water, there could be water in space,” said Christopher Tran, an visitor to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.
If the comet’s ice is genuinely water, possibilities are mind blowing.
“Pretty important for life, so we want to know the story of water. How it came to be here on earth and how we maybe came to be here on earth,” the museum’s lead astronomy educator of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science told CBS 11 News. The museum’s Rachel Thompson flew us through a whirlwind planetarium tour of the probe’s voyage. Literally more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
The journey took more than a decade and covered a total for 4-billion miles, taking a circuitous trip through the Solar System, to come up to 310-million miles away so they could land on it Wednesday.
“It had to pass Earth three times and Mars once to try to speed it along,” Thompson said adding “It’s essentially borrowing the gravity of those objects to kind of speed it up.”
The probe landed but there’s a hiccup. It’s not properly anchored. Harpoons that were to secure the lander to the comet were not deployed. In fact, the lander may have bounced on its first approach and landed successfully on the second try. Scientists are trying to nail it down so it doesn’t float away.
Click on the links below to follow Dr. Armstrong’s work and the progress of the space probe -
UT Arlington Professor To Become American Chemical Society Fellow
Rosetta in the UK
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