You've waited years for this.
I've waited years.
This was almost the perfect day.
Almost.
Rosetta was and is a unique space mission.
It's a travel not just in space, it's also a travel back in time to the very
early days of the solar system.
This is the story of the epic, ambitious mission to land a spacecraft onto a
comet hurtling through space.
Nothing like it had ever been attempted before or since.
Rosetta completely transformed our view of comets.
It was a mission 25 years in the making.
That all came down to a few frantic hours.
Philae was not anchored, it bounced.
We don't know where it is.
But let's go back a bit to 2004.
The Rosetta spacecraft, with its little Philae lander, tucked away inside is
about to launch.
Uh, well, the actual launch took place on the 2nd of March in 2004.
The first part of the mission was just to catch up with the mysterious comet
known as Comet 67P.
That took ten years, during which everything from Rosetta was powered
down, only to be woken up as it neared the comet.
It was quite a nervous time when Rosetta was coming out of hibernation.
Because if it didn't wake up, that was curtains, really.
Billion euros of kit out in space and if it didn't call home at the expected
time, there was very little that could be done about it.
And then it got this, it got this signal, "wake up, Rosetta", and it's
just like it hasn't woken up.
All right, send the signal again.
Switch it off and switch it on again.
Ta-dah! It's woken up, which was just so, so much of a relief.
Hurdle one, out the way.
When Rosetta woke up that, that was really the point where everybody got
excited again.
We had no idea how the comet would look like.
We don't know what shape it is.
It's probably spherical...
Ish.
We didn't immediately see the high-quality images.
We saw better and better ones, the closer and closer Rosetta came.
Then, wow, what shape is that?
The shape is not potato shaped as we expect.
It's not roundish.
It's...
The comet has this kind of rubber duck shape.
It's like one of those yellow plastic ducks.
And that made hurdle two that extra bit harder, landing Philae safely on top of
it.
There was no area on this comet, which is nice and smooth as we have hoped for.
The terrain was rough everywhere.
So there was a risk.
But that also made it fascinating and interesting.
Philae was equipped with little harpoons to fire and help it cling onto the
comet once it made contact and the landing site had to be meticulously
chosen to allow Philae to recharge the solar batteries in the glow of the Sun.
The stakes were huge.
This was a lifetime's work for most of the scientists on the Rosetta mission.
The team already knew that there may be a problem with the thrusters that were
supposed to slow down Philae's approach.
But the time had come to deploy Philae and on the 12th of November 2014, off
it went.
One could see the Philae lander as it moves away from the main spacecraft,
getting smaller and smaller with the landing gear successfully deployed.
I found this already very emotional to see the baby go after ten years attached
to the spacecraft, you now see it in freedom on its way to the last 22
kilometres to the surface of the comet.
And then Philae was free falling for almost exactly seven hours to the
surface of the comet.
Everybody was jittery and just waiting and waiting and waiting for the signal
to say it had landed.
And then.
I just go absolutely: "Hey, it's landed.
It's landed.
I'm so excited. It's landed, it's landed."
You know, it was just the tension that had wound up and the release of that
tension and the relief.
You've waited years for this.
I've waited years. Ah, I'm just so excited.
I'm going to cry.
I'm sorry, it's fantastic.
And of course, everywhere in the world, in the control rooms, in the scientific
teams, people started to open the champagne and started to celebrate.
It landed, it was fantastic.
It was wonderful. Everybody was really, really, really happy.
In the control room. We thought, "Yeah great, we are landed.
We have the touchdown signal."
But the mood in the control room was suddenly very different.
Something wasn't right.
Within a few minutes, we realised that although we have landed and although we
still got radio contact which was positive, we did not anchor and the
lander was moving again.
And then the principal investigators came out of their little cocoon and Ian
came up to me and he gave me a big hug and I gave him a big, big hug and said,
"Oh, you know, it's fantastic, isn't it?
It's really great.
You know, you must be so, so proud and pleased."
And he said, "no, has this gone wrong?
It bounced. We don't know where it is."
I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, it hasn't been announced yet, but
it will be announced in a minute that actually Philae did land, but the
harpoon didn't anchor it."
"And the little crampons on the legs couldn't get a grip and so it's b
ounced."
And we had no idea what's going on, where we would jump and how we would
land and when we would land.
Oh, dear.
Philae had crashed off the face of the comet and bounced about one kilometre
back into space.
Any further, and it risked escaping the comet's weak gravitational pull and
drifting off into space forever.
Anxiously, they waited.
We had no idea whether this would be a successful mission or would be just a
touch and we would never again hear from the landers.
And then the news came in.
So we did land somewhere and we still had radio contact, we still received
signals, and this was the moment of great relief because that was the moment
where we knew we are at the surface and we can still communicate with the
lander.
But the good news didn't last long.
It had landed in the shade.
Not great for something reliant on solar power.
This meant they had less than 72 hours of battery time to undertake months'
worth of scientific collection.
The clock was ticking.
So, it's one of those things.
It's like, okay, let's just throw away ten years' worth of calculations and
let's just redo them all over this space of 5 hours.
Which is what they did.
We also optimised the sequence in a way to get the maximum science out of the
energy available.
Once they knew they'd only got 70 hours and it was just going to seep away, it's
like, it wasn't if you turned all the instruments off, the battery would stay
at that particular level.
No, because it was so cold.
It was having to maintain, it was having to keep heaters on as well to
make sure that the instruments kept working.
So, you just knew you'd got 70 hours full stop.
All right, So you work for 70 hours.
You just did it.
You just barrel through, get as much data as we can.
And amazingly, almost all of the instruments on Philae had survived the
impact it was go time.
We were very lucky.
I mean, we ended up in an orientation that the antenna were pointing, well
upward, so to say, that we could establish the radio link with the main
spacecraft. And again, we were also lucky because we could switch on the
instruments, we could do fantastic science from the surface of the comet.
About 80% of the science goals of the Philae lander were achieved.
So it was an absolute fantastic success.
You know, the fact it crash landed, got around that.
It was an amazing success.
This was, of course, a bit sad to see the voltage of the battery drop.
and knowing that Philae will go into a hibernation.
And eventually that's what happened.
Even in those few hours, Philae had unveiled a world full of surprises, of
dust and debris.
Gases erupted from deep within the comet.
Even the crash landing threw up interesting discoveries.
Even by analysing the bounce itself.
We got information on what's the surface made of, and it was a bit
surprising that the surface was rather hard.
But perhaps most exciting of all, was what this comet was able to teach us
about us.
The Rosetta mission had as one of its goals to understand the building blocks
of life.
Because Comet 67 P was rich in organic compounds like phosphorus, carbon,
oxygen, nitrogen and the amino acid glycine, all essential for the origin of
life,
and offering tantalising clues as to how these compounds may have arrived on
Earth in the first place.
So, the original building blocks of life came from comets.
While Philae had gone into eternal hibernation, the mothership Rosetta
continued to fly around the comet, collecting data for two more years.
But then, Rosetta's time had to come.
In a last-ditch effort to get as much out of the mission as possible.
The team decided to crash land Rosetta into the comet, collecting data along
the way and allowing scientists to get one last look at their old friend Philae
.
Took this sort of shallow dive onto the surface of the comet and then sort of
crash landed and its camera was going the whole time, so, we saw these last
pictures of the surface rushing up to greet Rosetta.
And then...
The signal died and you got this little sort of oscilloscope thing with nothing
on it. Just like, you know, like somebody when they die, and you see the
signal die on the heart thing and it was just like.
It was so devastating.
People were in tears. I cried and it's just hell's teeth, it's a robot, you
know. But it's been part of your life for so long and so important.
So, that was the end of the Rosetta mission.
There is still many, many publications done using the data from Rosetta.
That's still the most relevant and best scientific information we have from a
comet.
Rosetta completely transformed our view of comets.
To some extent, what we know about the evolution of the solar system and what
we believe about the formation of life.
All of this is, is triggered by Rosetta and this is not often in lifetime you
get a chance to get involved in such a project.