Tag Archives: NASA

Nice video summary of the Rosetta mission

Although Rosetta is primarily a European Space Agency mission, it also has US involvement, and NASA has recently released a nice video about the encounter:

As the video says, the spacecraft, lander and all instruments are currently in hibernation, since Rosetta is so far from the Sun that even with her 32 m span of solar arrays, there is not enough power available. Of course this doesn’t mean that the teams are sleeping also! There are still a lot of details to pin down before the comet encounter, from exactly which orbits are possible as the comet becomes active, to the scientific planning of individual instruments.