TO CATCH A COMET

TO CATCH A COMET

FRIDAY, MARCH 11 @ 7:00PM & 11:00PM

Billions of kilometers from Earth, a spacecraft the size of a car traveled towards an icy rock 2.5 miles across hurtling through space at tens of kilometers per second. It had been in space for ten years, but on Nov. 12, 2014 it did something no other spacecraft had ever attempted — orbit and land on a comet.

Rosetta, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) orbiter and Philae, the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) lander were not short of ambition. It took a generation, 30 years, to get to this point along a rocky road besieged by technological challenges, faulty launch vehicles and budget constraints, all of which conspired to stop the mission in its tracks.

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