Two spacecraft have just made history. One is the European Space Agency’s comet chaser, called Rosetta (after the famous stone which helped decode the Egyptian hieroglyphics). The other is NASA’s 1EEE3, which is the first to study the solar storm from the Sun.
The two spacecraft celebrate human curiosity as well as capability to master the laws of Nature in space, ever since Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) defined the basic orbits of natural satellites. (See Box) Rosetta was launched on March 2, 2004 by an Ariane rocket.
After travelling for 10 years, 5 months and 4 days, it reached its target comet as planned. The comet, called Churyumov-Gerasimenko-67P, is only four km across, If you look at a photo taken by a powerful ground telescope, it looks like a speck of dust almost crowed out in the vast canopy of bright spots. It is like trying to search for a child in the Kumbha mela congregation! The spacecraft....
