Cervix Is Hard And Open

Chasing a comet to decipher our origins The dark galaxy clusters

We had to wait until 1800 and the fortuitous discovery of some 800 kg of grain to be able to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. The "Rosetta Stone" is a sheet that contains the same text in Egyptian and greek, which allowed, thanks to the knowledge of greek, to decipher the hieroglyphs today and give us the knowledge of a language that would otherwise have remained forever immersed in the mystery .

Similarly, the Rosetta mission is now on the road to get to decipher his "subscriptions" testifying to the origins of our solar system. This time, however, rather than wait for the emergence of some random dusty archaeological site, the tracks that we are hiding on some of the most remote bodies in our solar system: modern sites archaeological anything but dusty. Comets and asteroids , in fact, may be regarded as cocoons remaining from the formation of our solar system and therefore represent the best places where to go in search of our subscriptions.

During the time of the formation of the Solar System (more than 4 billion years ago) a huge disk of dust swirling around an embryo of our Sun has begun to thicken, creating a body size gradually more significant. The largest, called planetoids, have also begun to have a "life" and geological own gravity, while the smaller bodies have not reached sufficient size to attract more dust. Formed in the outer regions of the solar system, so cold that many of the materials of the disk of dust, including water, were in solid form, have preserved some of their chemical structure without undergoing significant changes later.

Some of the bodies in question are now comets: piles of rock and ice above that move around the Sun in highly elliptical orbits. This allows them to experience completely different conditions and environments, from extremely dark and cold regions, far beyond the outermost planets, to areas where the solar influence is so strong, both in terms of gravity and heat, to change radically their structure Physico-chemistry, giving the other hand the superb foliage. To find and use our new stele we have to reach and explore a comet before its first approach to the Sun, "guilty" to completely erase the evidence of which we are looking for.

Rosetta, whose name is directly borrowed from the famous stele of the above was launched by European Space Agency (ESA) in 2004 and has as its primary objective the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After almost five years Rosetta is about half way of his trip, which ends in 2014 beyond the orbit of Jupiter, 10 years after the launch and in conditions such that you can begin to turn around the comet rather than just pass by.

To read our stele and to take advantage of the long journey made, the probe carries with it Philae, a small robot (the one which is labeled a "lander") that will be issued by Rosetta very slowly to land on the comet. The severity of 67P, however, is so low (we're talking about a "mass" of about 4 km in diameter) that some drills and cables will be necessary so that the lander on the comet does not rebound and lost in interplanetary space.

reach a comet is a journey much more detail than the "standard" which is taken to reach a planet. The severity each of the massive bodies of the Solar System can be used to modify the initial orbit to reach a moderate spending more energy from the Earth in an orbit with a very low cost of fuel or, at worst, nothing at all. The trick is to 'steal' a bit of gravitational energy of the planet passing very near. The planet, infinitely more massive than our Rosetta, will not notice anything, the probe, however, receive a significant boost that will accelerate to its destination.

Road Rosetta has three gravitational encounters with the Earth and a Mars before he could reach the comet 67P and put into orbit around it so that it can be follow for a while on her way to the sun The last step of the probe close to the Earth occurred on November 13, 2009: we have seen, therefore, the last chance for us to see close to Rosetta and her a closer look at an inhabited planet. During his journey Rosetta has already visited, in September 2008, including the asteroid 2867 Steins, the next step in his short tour of small bodies in the solar system will, in about a year, the flyby with the asteroid Leutelia , another small step important for our search for clues about the origins of the Solar System.

Then the probe will be "off", or put in what is called a state of hibernation in which only a faint beep from his main computer will continue to reach Earth. Hibernation, planned to save energy during the coldest part of his trip will last for four years to make operational all the equipment back on board near the comet. Only then will again be switched on his instruments for our final assault to the hieroglyphics that still hide our origins.

Pierpaolo Pergola

Pictured from top to bottom: the Rosetta stone, dating from the second century BC and exhibited at the British Museum in London, a representation of the encounter between the Rosetta space probe and the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, what will happen in 2014, the complex trajectory of the Rosetta probe through the orbits of various solar system bodies.