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Billion-dollar European probe set for asteroid encounter

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-05 09:25

PARIS -- Far from Earth, a robot spacecraft has been prodded from deep slumber to make a rare encounter with an asteroid, the intriguing orbital debris that could offer clues into the making of the Solar System.

Artist's impression of the European Space Agency (ESA) probe Rosetta with Mars in the background. The pride of the ESA, Rosetta, has been ordered out of hibernation four and a half years into a 10-year trek that will take it into the dark chill of deep space, scheduled to rendezvous in 2014 with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, sending down a refrigerator-sized lab to examine its crusty surface. [Agencies]

The pride of the European Space Agency (ESA), the probe Rosetta has been ordered out of hibernation four and a half years into a 10-year trek that will take it into the dark chill of deep space.

Rosetta is due to rendezvous in 2014 with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, sending down a refrigerator-sized lab to examine its crusty surface.

But its 6.5-billion-kilometre (4.06-billion-mile) odyssey will be interrupted on Friday, when the craft will get down to some serious science as it zooms through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Some 360 million kilometres (225 million miles) from home, Rosetta will carry out a flip to let its array of cameras and scanners snatch what could be a stunning view of a 10-kilometer (six-mile) -long space rock called (2867) Steins.

It will aim to get unprecedented high-resolution data of Steins' shape, size and spin, and maybe also tease out clues about its density and composition.

These could add useful knowledge about how asteroids, hypothesised as primordial rubble left from the building of the Solar System, weather during their aeons in orbit, said Rosetta's mission manager, Gerhard Schwehm.

"It's an E-type [asteroid], which is a silicate asteroid with a dark surface, and has not been looked at before from a spacecraft," he told AFP.

And experts in monitoring space rocks that are a potential threat to Earth will also be looking closely, said Schwehm.

"There's a lot of scientific interest in asteroids as primitive objects, but there's also interest in them as hazards, as Near-Earth Objects," he said.

"It's always useful to see their different composition, shape and size. By looking at them close-up and then comparing them with ground-based data, you can see how your classification and measurement systems perform."

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