• Question: Although this is unrelated to spectroscopy, Philae successfully landed today, what are your opinions on this?

    Asked by Joe to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      I am so excited about it! And it isn’t as unrelated as you’d first think.
      Firstly I think it is incredible that after 10 years of travelling, they’ve managed to successfully land (it’s just been confirmed that it is stable up there!) a huge bit of scientific equipment on a ball of ice, dust, rock and who knows what else! How cool is that?!
      As I said, it is a huge piece of equipment and has a few different spectrometers and spectroscopes on board that it will use to determine exactly what the comet is made of. Once they’ve received that data, scientists will be able to (hopefully) predict whether a comet landing on Earth billions of years ago did bring with it key atoms/molecules for life to start.
      Science is so awesome!

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      The mission associated with Philae is actually a spectroscopic mission, as it is being used to study what this big piece of rock is made of.

      This is one of the most important areas of science, where different departments work together to make a difference, to build something that no one else could have done on their own. I cannot send a machine to space, but probably an engineer at NASA would not be able to interpret the results that they will be collecting, so teamwork in science is important.

      This is great news for science, although it is still a small achievement compared to what we need to do in order to be able to colonise space and explore it in more detail.

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Great chance to know more about the universe! First they said they could not ensure it would land then the good news came – more discoveries to come!

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      You can actually see a video about some of the spectroscopy equipment on Rosetta here: http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/54607-rosetta-imaging-and-spectroscopy-instruments/ and find out a little bit more about how they’re hoping to use these kinds of techniques to better understand what the composition of a comet is.

      I’ve really enjoyed following the story of the landing and seeing science promoted in such a positive way on the news too. It’s such a mammoth research project and it’s great to see it all going so well too.

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 14 Nov 2014:

      It is so cool! You say it is unrelated to spectroscopy, but Philae will have spectrometers on board to analyse the surface of the comet, and to understand the molecules that were likely in existence at the very beginning of the solar system! This way we can learn more about our origins and about how – and where – we came from!

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