Touchdown!

Against a whole lot of odds, the Rosetta mission has succeeded. The Human race now has a temporary, tiny foothold on the core of a comet.

Just getting there was a monumental task. The story started ten years ago. On top of a rocket sits the main probe and a tiny instrument lander. The lander will be like a pebble tossed down a well. Our little pebble will sit in the cometary well and hopefully tell us all kinds of things we don't know. The mission launches and one of the longest space missions in history begins.

Now we're faced with a slow motion chase. The probe can't head straight for the well. We don't have ability to fly something fast enough to make the 4 billion mile trip in any sane amount of time. A hundred year mission wouldn't be viewed as practical. So we sent it out in the wrong direction. Or at least nowhere near where the comet was. As is the case with most things involving orbits, it gets complicated. First we whip the probe around the Earth like a hula hoop in a classic slingshot maneuver. That gets things going much better than any rocket motor we could attach. Not to mention the amount of fuel needed. Still not fast enough. We send the probe to Mars, for it's help. Now we have a fast enough probe. All of 85,000 mph. Woot! Fast boat to China! NOT. I mean really. 85,000 mph. A mere 45000 years to the nearest star. Sigh. So  much for human ingenuity.

Well, our little pebble is on its way. We can sit back for the next 6 or 7 years and twiddle our thumbs.

Now it's 2014. The pebble is at the well and things get the scientific equivalent of exciting. Did we plan the orbit to the right well? Has anything interfered with the orbits of our pebble or the well? Will the pebble and the well end up in the same place at the same time? The number of things that could go wrong has probably kept our team's psychologist busy staving off anxiety attacks for most of the ten years.

But now we're up against the biggest gamble of all: tossing the pebble. The probe cosies up to our well. The pebble is tossed. A bunch of people are probably very close to breakdowns. Something goes wrong and the team finds out if stress can cause mass heart attacks in a group of people. Pure luck lends a hand. Our pebble's landing hardware and anchor has failed. Somewhere out in the dark and utter cold of space, something stopped working. Now our luck: the pebble lands anyway. Three bounces and it settles at the bottom of the well.

The relief is tremendous! Ten years work and billions of dollars have been well-spent. The pebble goes to work and we start getting back the very first pictures of a comet's core. It may be just black and white pictures of what looks like your average pile of rubble on Earth, but it's so very much more.

The pebble down, we are getting priceless data about what the solar system was like when the comet formed. The drama is not entirely over. The batteries powering all this activity have been sitting on the shelf for ten years and they don't last forever. So for the next 3 days they're being recharged by a solar panel array. Then it's back to work unlocking things hidden for eons.

We're just opening the book. There will be many chapters and it all adds up to a great treasure. I can't wait to read the next page!