The interactive exhibition «Rosetta – On the trail of the comet» is open until October 15th, at Tavira Living Science Center. The exhibition, aimed at the whole family, intends to make known a little more about comets, following the journey of the Rosetta space probe, built by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The mission of the Rosetta spacecraft and the Philae module, launched in 2004 by ESA, was to investigate on-site visit comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which travels between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter. With two solar panels 14 meters long, it is the first probe built to orbit and land on a comet.
Its name is an homage to the Rosetta Stone, a fragment of an ancient Egyptian granodiorite star, discovered in 1799 and whose text was crucial to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics by French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion.
Launched from the base in Kourou, French Guiana, the Rosetta probe only reached its target in 2014, making a total of 12 years, four months and 15 days of travel.
The spacecraft, consisting of the probe and the module, orbited the sun five times, performed two asteroid flyovers and one Mars flyover. On November 12, 2015, the Philae module became the first artificial object to land on the surface of a comet., after seven hours of space approach maneuvers.
The Rosetta and Philae module have 21 scientific equipment, and this mission was a pioneer in witnessing the evolution of a comet up close as it approaches the solar system's hottest regions.
The exhibition «Rosetta – On the trail of the comet», developed by Cité de l'Espace, aims to make known a little more about comets through the Rosetta Mission.
A comet is a smaller body of the solar system that, when approaching the sun, exhibits a diffuse atmosphere, called a coma and, in some, a tail, phenomena caused by the effects of solar radiation and solar winds on the cometary nucleus.
Consisting of interactive panels, a multimedia game and a model of the comet printed in 3D from real data acquired by the probe, concepts related to other stars, such as meteors and asteroids, as well as their importance in the Solar System are also addressed.
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