Rosetta Comet Mission in 360

[MUSIC]

[A rocky comet, glowing white, approaches. The logo for the American Museum of Natural History appears, then fades.]

NATALIE STARKEY (Writer, Worlds Beyond Earth Space Show): It’s just one of the most fascinating missions in space science history.

[Next to the comet, text appears on screen: “Rosetta Mission. Target: Comet 67P. Launched: March 2, 2004.”]

STARKEY: We actually caught up with a comet in space and we landed on it!

[The comet continues to approach until it is just a black silhouette with the Sun behind it. It fades and we are in the Hayden Planetarium. STARKEY sits in the planetarium seats, speaking to camera.]

STARKEY: Comets are really special because they are literally the very first things to have formed in our Solar System.

[Next to STARKEY, text appears: “Natalie Starkey, Writer, Worlds Beyond Earth.”]

STARKEY: At the far outer reaches, really far from the Sun.

[Above Natalie on the dome of the planetarium, rocky comets and asteroids circle a proto planet.]

STARKEY: So, they contain all the oldest ingredients that it took to form a solar system.

[Symbols for different molecules draw themselves from the rocky asteroids and comets.]

STARKEY: And the really special thing is that they’ve preserved them in the deep freeze ever since. So, it’s kind of like getting something out of your freezer that’s been preserved perfectly. They can tell us a lot about where we came from, and how all the planets came together.

[The scene in the planetarium dome fades, and we are in the Hall of the Universe at the American Museum of Natural History. DENTON EBEL stands in front of a meteorite, speaking to the camera.]

DENTON EBEL (Curator, Division of Physical Sciences): In Worlds Beyond Earth, we use space missions–

[Next to EBEL, text appears: “Denton Ebel, Curator, Division of Physical Sciences.”]

EBEL: –to take you, the public, our audience, to take ourselves­– to other places, places where we’ve only gone with robotic spacecraft.

[SPACE DRONE SOUND]

[The scene fades to black and we are floating among the stars. To the front, a spacecraft flies towards a yellow moon of Saturn, which is behind. Text reads: “Voyager 1. Launched September 5, 1977.” To the back, a spacecraft approaches Saturn itself, scanning the rings. Text reads: “Cassini-Huygens. Launched October 15, 1997.”]

EBEL: They’re our eyes and our ears and our noses and our fingers, touching and smelling and… and looking at the rest of the Solar System for us.

[The two spacecraft scenes fade. A new spacecraft orbits a rocky body and scans it. Text reads: “Rosetta. Launched March 2, 2004.”]

EBEL: And what we show in Worlds Beyond Earth is beautiful imagery from the European Space Agency of what the Rosetta mission saw around comet 67P as it approached the Sun.

[A timeline begins to stretch out around the circumference of our vision. An image of a rocket launch starts the timeline, with the text “March 2, 2004, launch.” Next, an image of Earth with the text “March 4, 2005, first Earth flyby.” Next, a spinning Mars appears with the text “February 25, 2007, Mars flyby.” Then a small asteroid with the text “September 5, 2008, Asteroid Steins flyby.” Then another small asteroid with the text “July 10, 2010, Asteroid Lutetia flyby.” Then an image of scattered stars with the text “June 2011 – January 2014, deep space hibernation.”]

[MUSIC]

EBEL: The Rosetta mission was an amazingly ambitious mission to follow a comet around the Sun–

[The timeline continues with an image of the comet 67P, with text “August 6, 2014, arrival at comet.” Next, an image of the Philae lander, with the text “November 12, 2014, Philae landing.” Then, a spinning image of the Sun with the text, “August 13, 2015, comet closest to the Sun.” Finally, an image of the comet spinning further away with the text, “September 30, 2016, mission ends.”]

EBEL: –from past the orbit of Mars.

[A timelapse of real images of comet 67P stitched together makes it appear that the comet is getting bigger and bigger, flying towards the camera.]

EBEL: The comet itself is Churyumov-Gerasimenko or 67P for short, which is a few kilometers in diameter, even though it’s really not a ball at all, it sort of looks like a rubber ducky.

[WIND]

[The Philae lander sits on a rocky surface, with the Rosetta spacecraft flying overhead on a field of stars.]

EBEL: It’s just beautiful! It’s an amazing sight to see this body drifting into the distance, emitting these gases as it goes around the Sun. And this is real data that we captured with the Rosetta mission with its cameras and its spectrometers that show what a comet is actually like up close.

[We are inside the ESA mission control, surrounded by people in front of computers and readout screens. Overhead, a spinning graphic shows the trajectory of the Rosetta mission. To either side, some images of the launch and of working on the spacecraft.]

STARKEY: I came on board the Rosetta mission fairly late. To be involved from the inside is just amazing. Seeing how much work goes in to just launching a space mission, and then the amount of work it takes to actually get it to where it’s trying to go. And that’s really when the work starts.

[The scene fades back to the Hayden Planetarium, with STARKEY speaking to the camera. Above, on the surface of the planetarium dome, we see the Rosetta spacecraft scanning comet 67P.]

STARKEY: The orbiter spent about a year mapping the surface. Every meter of it was mapped in detail–

[Next to STARKEY, text appears: “Natalie Starkey, Scientist, Rosetta mission.”]

STARKEY: –before they sent down a lander to actually land on it with a scientific laboratory to do analysis on the surface.

[Opposite STARKEY, a schematic of the Philae lander appears.]

STARKEY: So later on, they needed some young, new scientists to come in and help them with the data analysis when data started coming back to Earth. And so, I got the massively exciting opportunity to be involved with that.

[MUSIC]

[The scene fades to a panorama timelapse of the night sky. The Milky Way is visible and moving overhead. A few shooting stars appear near the horizon.]

STARKEY: We learnt so much about our solar system history. We learnt that there’s amino acids on a comet, which means that they could have brought life to Earth one day.

[A depiction of our Solar System and the Asteroid Belt fades in. The Asteroid Belt appears as filled with tiny golden dots.]

STARKEY: Our Solar System is not finished. Even on the cold side of the Asteroid Belt, where we’re looking at frozen, icy bodies, actually. There’s tons of activity and tons of processes–

[The camera dives into the Solar System and Earth looms into the screen.]

STARKEY: –that are not that dissimilar to what we find on our own planet.

[Credits roll on either side of the screen, next to the spinning globe of Earth.

Worlds Beyond Earth is dedicated to the memory of Charles Hayden in celebration of the 150^th anniversary of his birth and made possible by the generous support of the Charles Hayden Foundation.

Proudly sponsored by Bank of America.

Generously sponsored in loving memory of Wallace Gilroy.

Producer
Lee Stevens

Executive Producers
Eugenia Levenson
Erin Chapman

VR/360 Director
Jason Drakeford

Camera
AMNH / L. Stevens and E. Chapman

Images / Archive
ESA
ESA–C. Carreau
ESA/CNES/ARIANESPACE-ServiceOptique CSG, 2004
ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team
ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
NASA
S. Atkinson

Music
Robert Miller

© American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY

The images shown at 1:40 – 1:53 are used pursuant to a CC BY-SA IGO 3.0 license, the terms of which continue to apply to those images. Please consult the video description for additional information.]

[MUSIC ENDS]