Rosetta homes in on its target

On the upcoming 6 August, after a ten-year voyage through interplanetary space, the Rosetta space probe will become the first ever spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, orbit around it and deploy a soft touchdown lander.

The prime objective of the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Rosetta mission is to help understand the origin and evolution of the Solar System. In particular it will investigate the role played by comets in bringing water to the Earth and maybe even life itself.

Both the entry into orbit and the landing on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will be controlled from Earth by a team of engineers, with a crucial role being played by GMV. It has sent some of its staff to the Rosetta Science Operations Centre within the European Space Agency’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC/ESA) in Villafranca del Castillo (Madrid), to the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany and to the Control Center (CC) of the French Space Agency (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales: CNES) in Toulouse, France.

GMV also played a key role in the Mission Analysis stage since years before the actual launch. Among other activities it is also participating in the planning of scientific operations, planning control of the three instruments and preparation of the operations for the main mission phase (the comet phase).

GMV’s personnel posted to Germany, for their part, are participating in the flight dynamics operations, specifically trajectory control and generation of the necessary commands for controlling the probe’s orbit and attitude, a responsibility dating right back to the launch in 2004. GMV’s flight dynamics team will carry out additional comet-approach tasks: design of approach-, orbit- and descent-trajectories; processing of images from Rosetta’s onboard cameras and estimating the comet’s navigation-affecting characteristics.

GMV’s personnel posted to France are maintaining the tools used by the CC of CNES to calculate necessary illumination and visibility criteria to decide the comet landing point and also the possible descent trajectories of the Philae soft touchdown lander.