Rosetta: The Complete Mission in Real-Time 3D
November 12, 2014
Experience the full Rosetta mission: follow the spacecraft's real ten-year journey across the Solar System to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, then Philae's landing on November 12, 2014, in a real-time 3D reconstruction.
It's March 2, 2004.
You are about to follow the longest journey ever flown to a comet: ten years across the Solar System to a world just four kilometres wide.
Liftoff. An Ariane 5 climbs off the pad at Kourou, carrying Rosetta and its lander Philae toward deep space.
The two solid boosters burn out and fall away, their work of punching through the lower atmosphere done.
The fairing splits open and drops away, uncovering Rosetta for the vacuum ahead.
The main stage has burned out. It drops away beneath you, and the upper stage takes over, driving Rosetta the rest of the way to orbit.
The upper stage fires one last time and flings you out of Earth orbit, onto a ten-year cruise toward comet 67P.
Earth falls away behind you. In moments the world that built you is a shrinking blue disc, and deep space opens ahead.
The burn is done. Rosetta casts off the spent upper stage and, for the first time, flies entirely on its own.
Rosetta spreads its two fourteen-metre solar wings and raises its antenna, ready for the long journey.
You are far from home now, coasting on a one-year orbit around the Sun. It will carry you all the way back to Earth, where a close pass will steal a little of the planet's speed, the first of four gravity assists that fling you toward the comet.
March 2005. Home again: Earth swells ahead as you dive back in for the first gravity assist.
Closest approach. You skim just above the planet, and its gravity bends your path and adds to your speed.
Flung onto a wider orbit, you climb away from Earth, now bound outward toward Mars.
February 2007. A rust-red world grows ahead: Mars, and your only planetary gravity assist. You fall toward it.
Closest approach. You skim low over Mars, close enough to graze its thin air, and the red planet's gravity bends your path back toward Earth.
Mars shrinks behind you as you climb away, now falling back toward Earth for the second time.
November 2009. Earth one last time: it swells ahead for the final gravity assist of the cruise.
Closest approach. A last skim past Earth, its gravity flinging you out toward Jupiter's orbit and the comet waiting there.
Flung outward for good, you climb away from Earth into the deep space where you will hibernate for years.
January 2014, Rosetta wakes. Ahead, comet 67P grows from a point of light into a strange, two-lobed world.
August 2014. After ten years and six billion kilometres, you arrive at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
You settle into a survey orbit, circling the slowly tumbling nucleus to map it before choosing where Philae will land.
November 2014. Holding station above Agilkia on the small lobe, you are ready to release Philae toward the surface.
You let Philae go. The little lander unfolds its three legs and begins a slow seven-hour fall toward Agilkia, the comet turning beneath it.
The surface rises to meet Philae. Without working thrusters or harpoons, it drifts down under 67P's feather-light gravity.
Contact. Philae touches the surface of a comet, the first spacecraft ever to land on one.