Last week Wednesday marked the culmination of what can only be described as a fantastic feat of science and engineering. After 10 years and 500 million kilometres through space, the Philae lander from the Orbiter Rosetta landed on comet 67/P, a comet only 4 kilometers in diameter. It became the first ever space vehicle to make a soft landing on a comet.
Built by a European consortium, the mission of the space probe was to conduct several scientific experiments that would significantly advance our understanding of comets. Though the Philae landing did not go as planned – it bounced several times away from its designated landing spot – the mission controllers were still able to do much before they lost communication due to its batteries running down.
The Rosetta spaceship was named after the Rosetta Stone, an inscribed piece of volcanic rock found in Egypt in 1799 that allowed scientists to decipher hieroglyphics and thus understand ancient Egyptian culture, while the Philae lander was named for the island on the River Nile where an obelisk was found that helped unlock the secrets of the Rosetta stone. The lander weighs about 220 pounds and is the size of a regular washing machine. The Rosetta mission hoped to learn about the composition of comets and how they interact with solar winds.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge, none of our universities followed or encouraged their science and engineering students to follow this event as it was happening. While the attention of the world’s science community and even mass media have been engaged by the activities of the Rosetta mission, it barely made a blimp on our consciousness. Images from the spacecraft should have been broadcast, seminars and lectures held to educate students on the scope and purpose of the mission, if not for anything at least to fire the imagination and passion of students; to teach them the wonder of exploration and discovery and how much can be achieved by human ingenuity and determination; to open the minds of our youths to the strides and advances being achieved every day and hopefully to instil in them a burning desire to shoot for the stars.
Imagine a spacecraft built on technology that is 10 years old today, journeyed for 10 years and 500 million kilometres and it can still be controlled over such a great distance! This is not science fiction; it is reality. As a country we need to begin to emulate such feats. You might ask what good landing on a comet would do for us. What tangible benefits would we get from spending hundreds of millions of dollars for what, to all intents and purposes, is a one-way trip?
Apart from the operational and technical lessons to be learnt, the technologies that are developed in order to make such missions possible have very many valuable real world applications. It is knowledge gleaned from missions like this that keeps Europe and America ahead of us.
Finally, I do believe that all this is achievable to us. We only need to commit our considerable human and material resources to such projects that lift the spirit and psyche of nations instead of squandering them on white elephant projects.
Patrick Awodu
