Comet Quest: how the Rosetta mission created a new archaeological site in space (original) (raw)

Archaeological sites where humans have carried out scientific activities beyond the Earth are not as rare as you might think. The planets nearest us—the Moon, Mars, and Venus—are littered with landers, rovers, probes, and craters where spacecraft have crashed on the surface. Further afield, spacecraft orbit the Sun, Saturn, and Jupiter. Others are roaming out at the edges: the Pioneers, Voyagers, and New Horizons. And in Earth orbit itself, there are millions of pieces of " space junk " , which far outnumber the active satellites providing us with telecommunications, navigation, Earth observation data, and timing signals. It's a rich archaeological record and we have only just begun to investigate what it can tell us about 20th and 21st century life on Earth. In 2016 an intriguing new site was created. Launched in 2004, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft was sent on a decade-long quest to rendezvous with Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta was named after the one of the most renowned archaeological artefacts of all time, the Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. ESA explained the metaphor thus: As the worthy successor of Champollion and Young, Rosetta will allow scientists to look back 4,600 million years to an epoch when no planets existed and only a vast swarm of asteroids and comets surrounded the Sun. This is a deep archaeology indeed.