Rosetta mission prepares to make first controlled “soft” landing on comet

After a 10-year mission and hundreds of millions of miles of travel, the Rosetta mission is preparing to make the first controlled ''soft'' landing on a comet, thanks in no small measure to the stellar contribution of the UK space industry, The Telegraph reported.

The Rosetta spacecraft which has been orbiting 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko since August, would tomorrow deploy its Philae lander unit down to the comet's surface, firing two harpoons into it to secure itself.

The mission would provide the most detailed information yet about a comet's composition and help answer a number of questions about how life on earth began.

In addition to stimulating interest in space, the mission had also highlighted just how major a player the UK was in the hi-tech industry, with British businesses building many of the systems critical to the mission's success.

According to new data from ADS – the trade body representing the UK's aerospace, defence security and space companies – the UK's space sector now had an annual turnover of £11.3 billion, and grew 7.3 per cent last year.

It was also a major employer, and helped provide over 100,000 jobs in total – directly employing 34,300 people in highly skilled roles and supporting a further 72,000 jobs indirectly.

The mission would reach its climax when the mission scientists attempt their most audacious feat to date - to put a robotic lander on a moving comet, CNN reported.

According to Matt Taylor, European Space Agency project scientist, Rosetta was "a big deal".

Rosetta had rendezvoued, orbited and would soon deploy a lander to the comet surface and if that was not enough firsts, the orbiter would remain alongside the comet for over a year, keeping a close watch on its  activity as it approached the Sun, and got to within 180 million km in summer next year, when the comet would be expelling hundreds of kilograms of material every second.

Accordng to Claudia Alexander, project scientist, US Rosetta Project, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, "Rosetta was an attempt to explore not only an object (comets) that were not yet fully understood, but also reach backwards in time, like a detective, to piece together more about our origins. She added the mission called boldness, to take on risk."