How an earplug and a robot can simulate a comet landing
In short: Landing on a comet is a high-stakes dance with almost no gravity. To teach students the physics of microgravity, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst uses an earplug and a rotating robot to recreate the precarious descent of the historic Philae mission.
The Rosetta mission, launched on March 2, 2004, via an Ariane 5 rocket, was a decade-long endeavor to decode the solar system's history. Its primary goal was to orbit and land on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission reached a milestone in August 2014 when the spacecraft first entered orbit, eventually deploying the 100-kg Philae lander on November 12, 2014.
Landing on a comet presents unique mechanical challenges due to the object's negligible gravitational pull. To simulate this, Alexander Gerst used the weightless environment of the Space Station, using an earplug to represent Philae and an inactive SPHERES robot to represent the comet. He demonstrated how increasing complexity—moving from a stationary target to a rotating and moving one—mirrors the difficulty of the actual descent, which took approximately seven hours.
The real-world landing was famously unstable. While Philae was designed to anchor itself using three ice screws and two harpoons, the harpoons failed to fire. This caused the lander to bounce up to 1 km into the air before settling in a precarious, sideways position on a cliff face. This instability was compounded by the comet's 12.4-hour rotation, which left the lander in shadow for nearly 11 hours, preventing solar panel recharging.
Despite these setbacks, the mission provided groundbreaking data. Instruments on Philae detected organic molecules, including the amino acid glycine, and the mission achieved the first detection of molecular oxygen on a comet. The mission concluded on September 30, 2016, with a controlled impact of the Rosetta orbiter into the comet's surface.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Demonstrating Rosetta’s Philae lander on the Space Station
- Also: Rosetta-Philae - NASA Science
- Also: Rosetta | ESA Comet Exploration & Spacecraft Technology | Britannica
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