TIM FURNISS / LONDON
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will finally be launched on 26 February on its voyage to place a lander, Philae, on a comet for the first time. Rosetta will be launched by Ariane 5G from Kourou, French Guiana more than a year later than planned.
The comet probe was to have been launched in January last year en route to the comet Wirtanen, but the mission was postponed following the failure of the uprated Ariane 5 ECA on its December 2002 first flight.
Rosetta will not reach its new target, the comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, until mid-2014 after a protracted 5 billion km journey around the Solar System. This will involve gravity-assist fly-bys of Earth in 2005, 2007 and 2008, and of Mars in 2007. The craft will fly past and explore an asteroid in late 2008 and, after a small course change in 2011, will continue its journey uninterrupted, crossing Jupiter's orbit and heading to the asteroid.
In October 2014, Rosetta will deploy the Philae lander and orbit the comet for 17 months, studying its chemical and physical composition as it comes to within 500 million km of the Sun in its elliptical orbit. Comets are thought to contain embryonic material from the formation of the Solar System.
ESA will pay Russia $152 million to uprate the Soyuz booster for launches from Kourou, where a new pad is being built with another $361 million of ESA funding. France is bearing half of the costs. First launch of the Soyuz ST, scheduled for 2006, will be a test flight, says Viktor Nikolyev, director general of Starsem, the Arianespace-affiliated European-Russian company responsible for commercial Soyuz launches. The ST will carry a 3,000kg (6,600lb) payload into geostationary transfer orbit from Kourou, and a dual-satellite launch capability is being considered.Source: Flight International
