Egypt4u

Later today we should see if the space probe Rosetta will wake up from a 2.5 year slumber and start its rendezvous with the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It was sent up by the European Space Agency and has a large UK contribution, around half of the experiments on board involve British scientists, while the craft itself was designed and built by engineers at Astrium UK.

It has been on it’s mission for 10 years and was put to sleep in order to conserve power and if all goes to plan and it does wake up from it’s long sleep then it will resume it’s mission and hopefully sometime in August it will attach it’s own lander craft named Philae to the comet by firing harpoons into the surface, so wakey, wakey Rosetta and good luck!

Ooooooo it all sounds exciting !

I find all this stuff fascinating but completely mind blowing. We mortals cannot really comprehend 'space' and the concept of infinity.
Apparently when Rosetta (great name) wakes up one of its first tasks is to locate earth so that its antenna can point in the right direction. With earth many millions of miles away that is even smaller than the proverbial needle in a haystack
I also hope that all goes well and contact is again established and the landing craft is successful......

I'm with you there Grandad, I also find the concept of space mind boggling and utterly facinating.

Have heard nothing about this but it sure sounds fascinating! Hopefully it will wake up and do whatever tasks it was assigned.

Can you imagine the people here on earth waiting for the last 10 years to see if their efforts will be successful?

Latest news:
The European Space Agency's comet-chasing spacecraft, Rosetta, has woken from hibernation.

A signal confirming its alert status was received by controllers in Darmstadt, Germany, at 18:16 GMT.

I understand that Rosetta is about 500 million miles away. By my calculations it would take about 45minutes for a radio signal to travel that far. So, if an instruction is sent to the craft you must expect to wait about 90 minutes before you get 'Copy that'

Amazing stuff........

I get it but I don't. It amazes me at the level that the people who are working with Rosetta are thinking at and how they've been able to put it all together. Their accomplishments are phenomenal and so far away from how my own brain works. Even the time spans they're talking about are phenomenal too in comparison to the time frames normal people use in their daily lives.

I find it facinating that they have slung it around the Earth and Mars a couple of times to gain some speed then hurled it off to intercept a speeding comet at some point in space and time and all this will be done with little or no intervention when it actually happens, truly mind boggling.

One to follow over the coming months

Good to have something exciting (at least to the likes of us with an interest) in the news and to appreciate the capability of todays technology. I can't understand why there are fewer university students doing engineering, physics, and technology. To me they are the most exciting subjects to get involved in.

Mrs G had an appointment last week at the hospital in the AMD (Age Related Macula Degeneration) department. This is an eye condition that can lead to blindness and medical science together with engineering technology have made tremendous strides in treating and controlling the condition. They have eye scanners that not only take images of the eye but also do a kind of MRI of the tissue surrounding the retina so that they can see if there is any fluid in the retina wall.

I watched all this going on and couldn't resist a comment of how medicine and technology come together these days to progress treatment for things that just a few years ago were untreatable.

Science is amazing...

And what about the latest eye treatment where they have injected some sort of DNA into the eye and it has started to restore vision in some people with certain types of eye disease.

Haven't heard about the latest in eye restoration technology but the advances medicine and science are making is truly phenomenal.

Hopefully they'll be a TV Special on Rosetta in the near future. Other than watching the TV News almost ALL my TV viewing is documentaries, Nat Geo channels etc.