Rosetta Probe

[Nom de ploom]

interesting story here on the beeb about the Rosetta probe.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-2518...

this story reminds me of two lines from two Hollywood films...

Bruce Willis - Armageddon "you're NASA for christ sake, you think this st up, you have a bunch of people sat around thinking st up, and a bunch of people backing them up..."

Jeff Goldblum - Independence Day "well, what we'll have to do is launch a satellite rover type arrangement and LAND it on a comet (which won't be stationary btw), oh before that we'll have to wake it up...then to get it to land we'll have to fire tethers into the surface to make it stable before we even start our analysis..." etc etc I'm wrongly paraphrasing there but my drift is how do you think this up and then how do you contemplate executing it???

brains the size of planets these ppl, no pun intended...full marks, hope it works!

[Eric Mc]

They and others have interecepted a couple of comets and asteroids already - so this is what they do for a living.

ESA met up with Halley's comet almost 30 years ago.

Deep Impact fired a high speed slug into a comet a few years ago and observed the results from clse-up.

These guys are experts at this kind of stuff.