Sept. 3, 2008 -- Four years into a 10-year journey to reach a comet, the European spacecraft Rosetta is scheduled for a key bit of sight-seeing this week -- a close encounter with an asteroid named Steins. Rosetta's final destination is the comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The probe is slated to go into orbit around the comet in 2014 and dispatch a small lander to its surface. But scientists have awakened Rosetta from its interplanetary slumber to moonlight as an asteroid probe. The spacecraft, which has reached the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is on track to pass within 500 miles of Steins Friday afternoon. Pictures and data from the encounter should be streaming back to Earth later that day, though Rosetta has been taking aim at Steins for a few weeks now. The images are being used to tweak Rosetta's trajectory so that it is properly aligned for the encounter, said Sylvain Lodiot, with the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany. Steins, which has never been visited by a probe before, will be Rosetta's first science target. A second encounter, with asteroid 21 Lutetia, is planned for 2010. Less than a dozen of the hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the asteroid belt have been visited by spacecraft. Scientists study asteroids to learn more about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Steins is among the smaller inhabitants of the asteroid belt, measuring about 3 miles in diameter. Astronomers don't know too much about it, but they hope Rosetta's visit will change that. The probe will be using all its science instruments at some point during the encounter to determine the asteroid's mass, shape, surface features and other characteristics. Primarily, however, the flyby is a practice run for when Rosetta, the European Space Agency's flagship mission, reaches comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It carries a small lander, named Philae, that will, for the first time, drill into the comet to study its composition. Rosetta is to keep pace with the comet for a year, observing its nucleus as the comet soars toward the sun. Among its goals: to help scientists determine if comets provided the materials to seed life on Earth. Related Links: |
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