Translator: Krzysztof Wiankowski Reviewer: Nadine Hennig
Here you can see Rosetta flying.
This was around May.
Why actually travel to a comet?
Comets are small, about the same size as Bern,
they are jet-black.
They have neither a ring,
nor a beautiful spot, nor a moon,
nor anything else.
However, comets are "cool,"
and I mean it literally -
they are cold.
Comets are real witnesses of our past.
When we study comets,
we're doing archaeology in space,
but with more zeros in the dates
than we're used to in archaeology.
They are as old as the earth.
They formed together with the earth.
They have preserved material from that time.
They are real treasure chests.
This is where we are today:
30 km away from the comet.
This morning, at around 1 a.m.,
we arrived 30 km away,
and we are now orbiting the comet.
In the next few weeks, we'll move in closer,
to 20 km, and finally to 10 km.
What we've already done is to take a look at the comet,
first from Zürich,
as if it were the Eiger, the Mönch, or the Jungfrau.
These mountains are also around 4 km in size,
that is 4 km wide and 4 km high.
We observed first from Zürich,
then from Bern, then from Thun.
We're currently in Thun, soon we will be in Interlaken,
and then we will be pretty close.
We were supposed to blast off on 13 January 2003.
I don't know whose idea it was to launch on the 13th.
That's definitely not lucky.
Rosina, an instrument developed in Bern, was also supposed to have been on it.
And then the inevitable happened.
In the preceding December, an Ariane launch rocket crashed,
and we had to wait
because, first, we had to find out how it had failed.
The comet Wirtanen wouldn't wait,
so we had to look for another one.
It's also good.
It has quite a funny name: Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
A year later, we launched successfully.
And a year on from that,
Herr Hugendobler from Bolligen was quite lucky,
because he was able to photograph Rosetta.
He won a prize for it.
He was lucky,
because there were clouds over the rest of Europe.
(Laughter)
Rosetta came back in order to play ping-pong with the earth.
When you play ping-pong and hold your racket high,
and the ball strikes it, the ball departs with the same speed.
But you don't play ping-pong that way,
you move your racket.
The earth and the other planets do exactly the same thing
with a space probe.
The space probe comes, accelerates as it is attracted,
but then as it flies off past, loses speed again.
But, the earth isn't stationary,
it moves round the sun,
and the earth imparted part of that energy to Rosetta.
I'm not sure if you've noticed,
the earth has become somewhat slower.
(Laughter)
On 25 February, Rosetta sent a selfie home to us.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
It was taken by the camera
on the lander on Rosetta.
You can see the solar panel and Mars in the background.
250 km from the Martian surface, it was again playing ping-pong.
In the same year, it flew over the Antarctic,
taking a photo of Graham Land as it did,
again to gain speed;
yet again the earth became a bit slower.
3 March 2009: Flyby.
It flew over the night side of the earth.
You can see, it's November:
at the South Pole it's always light in November,
and at the North Pole you see the northern lights,
and you can see how much light pollution there is.
In June 2011, something happened
that Mr Garell probably didn't really like either.
Rosetta's heart stopped beating.
That was the last heartbeat at the time.
We switched it off.
It simply ran out of power.
It was so far away from the sun
that even the large solar panels were no longer sufficient.
But then in January this year,
she woke up.
We woke her up
using all possible alarm clocks,
but in truth,
in the end, she woke herself up.
We expected the signal -
she was woken up at 10 a.m. -
to arrive at quarter to seven in the evening,
but it didn't come.
At that moment, we felt a bit out of luck.
But at twenty past seven, it did arrive.
I have rarely seen adults
- except at a football match -
cheer so much, and just for such a short beep.
(Laughter)
Luck was still with us:
Since January, we had been getting closer and closer to the comet,
and it was a great moment,
as we were able to see
that something was there:
a 4 km long body in the almost infinite solar system was to be found.
We were then 5 million km from the earth,
and had traveled around 2 billion km to reach exactly 4 km away.
It was quite an achievement anyway.
(Applause)
In the end, we also saw
what a beast it was that we had flown to:
(Laughter)
it was obviously a rubber duck.
(Laughter)
Since the beginning of August,
we've been examining this rubber duck,
and it's as exciting as it is weird.
(Laughter)
You can well imagine.
It has both a front part and a back part,
a neck in the middle,
and an exhaust pipe at the back,
(Laughter)
and our instruments cannot keep up with the measurements.
But then the high point of the whole thing,
namely the landing, fails.
Rosetta herself is not to land, nor our instrument Rosina.
It is the lander that had taken the selfie that will touch down.
It's likely that it will take even more selfies
once it has touched down.
You've seen what it looks like, the rubber duck.
In this picture, the comet is nicely flat.
We fly Rosetta around the comet
and at the right time, we will release the little lander,
so it falls to the comet.
The comet is very light, it has almost no gravity.
I just hope the lander is released at the right time,
or it may miss the comet.
It will not go down fast,
but you can imagine -
there's not one flat spot on the comet.
That's what we are waiting for on 11 November.
I give it a 50% chance of coming off,
but considering how lucky we've been with the mission so far,
I think we've done well enough.
(Laughter)
If it goes wrong,
we'll have learned a lot anyway.
Rosetta is going to accompany the comet
for the next year and a half.
The end of the mission is at the end of 2015.
It may be extended.
I will be retiring officially in January 2016.
If it is extended,
I'll postpone my retirement too.
(Laughter)
Anyway, I will retire along with Rosetta.
(Laughter)
But Rosetta has a longer life yet.
We will lose contact,
but she will go on flying with the comet.
The comet is one that always stays in Jupiter's orbit.
One day, Jupiter will be in the vicinity.
This usually results
in the body being deflected,
even out of our solar system.
And who knows, perhaps in 300 million years,
she will enter another solar system.
Perhaps I will too, but I don't know.
(Laughter)
And I've come to the end.
(Applause)