[ Suspenseful music plays ]
♪♪
What asteroids are are, really, remnants
from when the solar system was forming.
♪♪
[ Growl ]
We also have to respect them [ Laughs ] as something that
could actually change our way of life, even today.
♪♪
We have high confidence that the dinosaurs were ended
by a very large impact of a asteroid on the earth.
♪♪
If a large enough asteroid were to hit the earth,
it would be quite cataclysmic.
♪♪
[ Explosion ]
Genge: Impacts are not necessarily just bad things.
The earth was very dry when it formed.
There was hardly any water.
There were hardly any carbon
and we think most of the ingredients for life
were delivered by asteroids and comets.
♪♪
You could spend the rest of your life
exploring every little part of the comet
and not see the same type of thing twice.
♪♪
Man: 10, 9, 8, 7,
6, 5.
So the near mission was designed and conceived
so that it would actually show up at an asteroid stop,
be in close proximity to it for an extended period of time.
- 1... - Just to see what an asteroid was like.
-...zero. And liftoff.
♪♪
Genge: Near launched in 1996.
Keep the pressure rising in all six -- motors.
And, like all planetary missions,
it takes a long time to reach the target.
Good chamber pressure on the main engine.
So it didn't arrive at Eros
until the 20th of December in 1998.
We have good engine control in the main engine.
Good engine control in the [ Indistinct ]
♪♪
As you fly into the body, you've never seen it before
and you start to see the images.
♪♪
At first, they're very fuzzy,
but then, they come more and more into focus.
♪♪
And, at every stage, you're seeing new things.
♪♪
It looks like it's two asteroids
that are just sort of resting on each other
and it's got those beautiful saddle regions
where they sort of touch each other.
♪♪
Genge: That phase of the mission lasted from December 1998
all the way to February 2001.
♪♪
The spacecraft was nearing the end of its life.
It couldn't fly back to earth.
♪♪
The mission manager had people start studying,
well, what would it take to actually bring the spacecraft
down to the surface, to have a soft landing,
so that maybe the spacecraft could even survive?
♪♪
When it was launched, it was never designed
to actually land on the surface.
I remember thinking that,
"there's no way this is going to work."
We have successfully deorbited around Eros
and we're on our way down.
There's no turning back now.
♪♪
Scheeres: It was a complete success.
♪♪
It landed, perched itself on the surface.
It was quite exciting.
[ Cheering and applause ] This is the first time
that any spacecraft has landed on a small body.
[ Laughs ]
Congratulations.
Near-shoemaker showed that it's possible
to touch down on an asteroid.
♪♪
The next big target is to bring a piece back to earth.
♪♪
Got it. Oop, nope. It dropped.
See if I can pick it up again.
I think it'll fit in the bag, Joe.
♪♪
Scheeres: When we went to the moon, we got lunar rocks,
then brought them back to the earth
and have been analyzing them ever since.
♪♪
It allows us to understand our own earth so much better.
It's sort of like archeology of the solar system.
Woman: Look, go.
So, hayabusa set the stage to answer that next question.
Ignition. [ Man speaking Japanese ]
Ignition and liftoff!
[ Speaking Japanese ]
Jaxa, the Japanese space agency,
wanted to send a spacecraft to an asteroid,
grab a piece, and bring it back to earth.
The very first sample-return mission.
♪♪
[ Cheering and applause ]
♪♪
Scheeres: It was a very ambitious mission.
♪♪
From the start, it was also sort of a cursed mission.
♪♪
Scheeres: The solar flare compromised their solar arrays,
so they had less power to push themselves on
towards the asteroid.
Furthermore, they were carrying some reaction wheels.
That was also a very large complication
because it changed the whole way
that they controlled the spacecraft.
♪♪
Hayabusa(1) is there to collect pieces of the asteroid
and that all begins on November 5, 2005.
♪♪
The spacecraft's going to slowly come down towards the surface
and then, they have a funnel
and that funnel touches down on the surface.
♪♪
It would fire a projectile into the surface.
The debris comes up the funnel
and it's then collected into the container
and then away it would go, so it was a touch-and-go.
♪♪
So there was nothing to make that plume of dust
go up into the sample container.
♪♪
Eventually, the spacecraft
leaves the surface and, unfortunately,
there is now a leak in one of the fuel lines.
♪♪
When you're leaking material into space,
it's like having another engine.
It's like a jet.
♪♪
They were able to tell that, in a few months,
they would actually be able
to get small commands into one of the antennas.
♪♪
For hayabusa, the struggles were not over.
So it had to get back to earth.
♪♪
Scheeres: Here is this crippled spacecraft,
you know, literally limping home.
♪♪
People are worried that the mission
is going to fail at this stage,
that we potentially may or may not have collected samples
and that it might not actually make it back to us.
Scheeres: So they're hanging on by a thread.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
For hayabusa, the struggles were not over.
It had to get back to earth.
♪♪
Scheeres: So they're hanging on by a thread.
♪♪
But, they were able to hang on.
♪♪
[ Man speaks indistinctly ]
They were able to successfully navigate
all the way back to earth.
♪♪
Nice flashes.
Oh, wow.
♪♪
40 kilometers.
♪♪
They have, indeed, collected
maybe 1,500 dust particles.
♪♪
One of the things we're interested with asteroids is
whether they delivered the oceans to earth.
♪♪
They are a match.
♪♪
So it's the first clue that, maybe,
all this wonderful water on the surface of the earth
actually comes from asteroids.
♪♪
Asteroids are fascinating,
but further out away from the young sun...
♪♪
...is where very bizarre objects were created.
The comets.
♪♪
People have always been intrigued
by these messengers that come out of the night sky.
♪♪
What are these objects? Where do they come from?
What are they made of?
♪♪
What's locked up as treasure or secrets in comets?
♪♪
For a long time, they were mysterious.
We didn't even know their orbits.
♪♪
And it really wasn't until the observations of halley's comet
where it was realized that they actually orbit the solar system,
that it comes back every 76 years.
♪♪
Halley's comet has a special place.
♪♪
1986 was a really special year because we got our first look.
♪♪
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
Man: First-stage servomotor started.
♪♪
The objective of giotto was pretty simple, really --
To intercept halley.
Final arming ready to go.
Man: Six, cinq...
Ignition.
First-stage. Ignition and takeoff.
First-stage flight.
[ Speaking French ] [ Applause ]
♪♪
The comet has an atmosphere, that we call the coma,
and then, the tail streams away from the comet.
And the tail also contains dust.
♪♪
Dust particles, although they might not seem hazardous,
if you fire them at a spacecraft at many kilometers per second,
even a small dust particle can destroy the spacecraft.
♪♪
Giotto made its rush towards halley's comet
and it's getting closer and closer to the nucleus.
♪♪
And it's being hit by particles.
They're picking up impacts.
♪♪
[ Beep ] It gets hit by a big one.
And it puts the spacecraft into a spin.
♪♪
And so, all of a sudden, its protection, its shield,
is not facing the dust particles.
[ Beeping ]
♪♪
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
♪♪
Genge: Giotto made its rush towards halley's comet
and it's getting closer and closer to the nucleus.
It gets hit by a big one.
♪♪
The camera goes dead.
And the spacecraft is still flying through,
through that debris.
And I think there were a lot of people there
who thought that they were going to lose the spacecraft
and that was it, that was the end of the mission.
♪♪
But, thankfully, it survived.
It went all the way through and lived on.
♪♪
They were just truly incredible.
♪♪
The comet, surprisingly,
is not this bright, clean bowl of ice.
It's dark.
It's almost black.
♪♪
We've learned about processes that are going on
inside a comet
that we would never have guessed,
unless we'd gone there.
[ Applause ]
Giotto was remarkable.
[ Applause ]
♪♪
When giotto flew past comet halley in 1986,
the flyby was around 68, 70 kilometers a second.
♪♪
You see it for a few minutes and then it's gone.
It's all over.
♪♪
To learn more, you want to go and rendezvous with a comet.
You want to fly alongside it.
♪♪
Can we learn about the evolution of these objects
by studying it over time?
And, of course, then, the idea comes up,
you would want to touch down on the surface.
You want to land there, sample material.
♪♪
To do all of that in one mission
is incredibly gutsy.
Dix, neuf,
huit, sept --
The first time I heard about the mission, I thought,
"they must be joking."
Cinq, quatre,
trois, deux,
UN --
♪♪
Décollage.
We launch in march 2004.
♪♪
Accomazzo: The whole travel to the comet was an adventure for rosetta.
♪♪
The comet is on an orbit with a different energy level,
compared to the one of the earth,
so we had to actually impart this energy to our spacecraft
to get to the same orbit.
♪♪
So we did this thing to use the planets
and to use their gravity
to slingshot us through space
on a different trajectory, with more speed,
in order to be able to get to the comet.
♪♪
We were really launched very fast,
but getting very far from the sun.
♪♪
We could not keep all the systems on board active
because the illumination of our solar panels
was getting very weak.
♪♪
So the decision was made, in fact, to turn it off.
♪♪
I hated that concept from the very beginning.
I'd been fighting it for years.
I was convinced we would never do it.
It was too crazy.
♪♪
Switching off the radio signal is like cutting a vital link.
♪♪
Accomazzo: You've been flying a spacecraft for seven years.
It's at hundreds of millions of kilometers away
and what do you do? You send the command
to switch it off and wake it up three years later.
It just doesn't make sense
and this is what we did.
♪♪
We spent two and a half years without contact
and we waited.
♪♪
Mccaughrean: We couldn't talk to it while it was in hibernation.
We needed it to wake up...
[ Ticking ]
...which it was due to do on the 20th of January 2014.
[ Cacophony of ticking ]
[ Ringing ] Man: 3, 2, 1.
Wake up! [ Alarm blaring ]
[ Echoing ] Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! Wake up! - Okay, good.
We were sitting all in the control room,
waiting for the signal to come.
And this was probably the most tense moment of the mission.
♪♪
This was everything or nothing.
It was life-or-death.
[ Ticking ]
Accomazzo: It was building up tension at that stage.
"Why it's not coming?"
♪♪
Ferri: It was very difficult to bear.
♪♪
We started really getting worried.
♪♪
Have we lost the mission?
♪♪
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
Man: Cinq, quatre.
Parker: To do all of that in one mission
is incredibly gutsy.
♪♪
Mccaughrean: We couldn't talk to it while it was in hibernation.
We needed it to wake up...
[ Ticking ]
...which it was due to do on the 20th of January 2014.
♪♪
It was building up tension at that stage.
"Why it's not coming?"
♪♪
Mccaughrean: Then, suddenly, the signal came.
[ Cheering, whistling, and applause ]
Ferri: When the signal came was a big relief for me, personally.
There was an explosion of joy.
A little blip on a noise spectrum told us
that it was there and it was calling home.
♪♪
Accomazzo: We made it.
Yes, yes. [ Laughs ]
That's a big success for everybody.
Mccaughrean: We have it. We're ready.
We now have the spacecraft back.
We can go and do the rest of this mission
and finally get to the comet.
[ Cheering and applause ]
♪♪
But, now, the mission starts because, now,
we have to get to the comet, fly around the comet,
orbit the comet, and land on the comet,
all within the next 10 months.
♪♪
Parker: Rosetta took 10 years from launch
'til we finally got to the target
that we were going to study.
♪♪
The comet we ended up deciding to go to
was 67p/churyumov-gerasimenko.
♪♪
At the beginning, the comet was just a very small dot.
♪♪
And then, day by day, the comet was growing
in the field of view of the camera.
♪♪
Ferri: We saw this incredible shape.
Some people have described it as a rubber duck.
♪♪
Parker: Comet 67p is about four kilometers in size.
♪♪
If you were standing on the bottom of the comet,
you might see a flat, dusty plain.
♪♪
If you were standing on the head of the comet,
it might look more rocky.
If you were standing on the neck of the comet,
you would be in this interesting valley,
kilometer-high cliffs on either side,
and running along the neck, between your legs,
is a huge crack.
♪♪
There are so many different types of surfaces and variety,
you could spend the rest of your life
exploring every little part of the comet
and not see the same type of thing twice.
♪♪
The first thing I thought was,
"we're never going to land on that thing."
Accomazzo: It was the morning of the 12th of November 2004.
There was excitement, but also tension for the upcoming events.
♪♪
Great news. We are go from the lander.
The commands have already been sent
now, we just have to wait for separation.
♪♪
Ferri: Rosetta just pushed very gently away.
It was like pushing it really like this.
18 centimeters per second is nothing, like this.
♪♪
The fall lasted seven hours.
♪♪
They could get the images of philae getting closer
to the surface, during the descent.
♪♪
[ Cheering, whistling, and applause ]
♪♪
Mccaughrean: As we got closer and closer,
you know, the tension began to rise.
♪♪
I was looking at the data coming from philae.
I wanted philae to survive the landing.
So I was just staring at the screen,
seeing this data coming.
♪♪
Accomazzo: We actually saw several subsystems activating.
♪♪
Ferri: We got the information that it had reached the surface.
[ Cheering, whistling, and applause ]
♪♪
We definitely confirmed that the lander is on the surface
and I leave it to Stephan. I think it's up to him to judge
how it's going now on the lander.
We were in a major success.
We had landed on a comet.
Accomazzo: This was the moment of the mission.
This was a huge success.
We are sitting on the surface
philae's talking to us.
More data to come.
[ Cheering and whistling intensify ]
Philae started taking pictures,
taking measurements, doing its jobs.
"I'm on the surface, yeah. I touched down."
[ Camera shutter clicking ] Yes, it had touched down on the surface,
but it hadn't stopped moving.
It's the redundant one.
The nominal one, one three.
Nominal is one three eight five.
♪♪
It took us 10 to 15 minutes
to realize that something was wrong.
This one is not going down, though.
The lander, the elevation did not go down.
The same resolution. It's probably due to --
Accomazzo: We realized that the radio signal was not stable.
It couldn't have been on the surface.
It was definitely lifted up and flying again.
How far is it going to bounce?
It's going to bounce.
I said, "it's not possible. It cannot be."
♪♪
Quite quickly, people began to realize
we must've bounced.
♪♪
It bounced.
It had a very long travel...
[ Static crackles, beep ]
And then, it hit the edge of a cliff,
[ static crackling ] Started tumbling.
Ferri: We were scared to death.
♪♪
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
♪♪
We were in a major success.
We had landed on a comet.
[ Laughing ] [ Applause ]
It took us 10 to 15 minutes
to realize that something was wrong.
This one is not going down, though.
It hit the edge of a cliff...
[ Static crackling ]
...started tumbling.
♪♪
Ferri: We were scared to death.
My fear was we are going to lose the contact now
and, if we lose the contact, that's it.
This is the end of the mission of philae.
♪♪
Mccaughrean: And then, finally, after two hours,
it touched down in a very dark place.
♪♪
Then, I found out later,
the signal was abruptly interrupted
and philae wouldn't transmit anymore.
♪♪
We haven't the faintest idea when the signal would come back.
♪♪
When I came in in the morning,
we see alarms coming into the control system
and it's the signal of philae.
♪♪
This little baby had been surviving
on the surface of the comet.
♪♪
So we started receiving data. Guess what we get.
The first image of the surface of the comet.
Here, real-time, we saw it real-time, coming in.
♪♪
This is just fantastic.
It's something that happens once in our life.
♪♪
You see the surface of the comet.
You see a portion of the leg
and you have the feeling that there is something odd.
Indeed, we found philae was tilted on its side,
but it was just the surface of the comet.
♪♪
The images came back and it was then
that we realized that we were in this place
that was almost completely shady.
♪♪
Ferri: It was in a dark area, so it would have not
had the chance to recharge the batteries.
♪♪
We knew then that we were going
to run out of power after three days.
♪♪
The whole three days on the comet
were certainly three of the most incredible days of my life.
♪♪
When you see the images, you get this very strong feeling
you are on a completely new world.
You are seeing a new world for the first time.
♪♪
The formations were really totally unexpected.
♪♪
Fractal geometries.
Ruptures everywhere, at every dimension,
from millimeters to centimeters.
♪♪
It gives you the impression of how the surface suffers.
The extreme variation of temperatures
by getting close to the sun and then back away.
It's a continual thermal stress.
♪♪
After three days, it was Friday afternoon.
It was clear that the battery was getting to the end.
♪♪
You could see philae fading out during the night,
during the last contact.
♪♪
But if we look carefully,
the bulk of the scientific mission of rosetta
still had to come because we flew there
to follow the comet in its orbit around the sun.
♪♪
The comet's getting close to the sun.
♪♪
Its activity increased significantly.
♪♪
Ferri: We could really see how the surface
is completely revolutioned by the sun.
♪♪
There were explosions.
♪♪
Holes observed in the surface with a underground structure,
which is still, today, totally unexplained.
♪♪
There were landslides that we have observed.
♪♪
You could see jets, gas jets, fountains,
coming out of the comet.
♪♪
You could see, actually, like snowstorms
going around the comet.
♪♪
Parker: So, on rosetta, we had a dozen instruments
and not all of these instruments take pictures.
♪♪
They get data in different ways,
such as the spectrum or measuring molecules.
♪♪
Squiggly-line data.
And those squiggly-line data
can sometimes have much more information
than the pictures do.
♪♪
The rosetta instrument found that there is
molecular oxygen trapped into the nucleus of the comet.
♪♪
Molecular oxygen couldn't have survived
the formation of the solar system,
therefore, it means that it was inside the nucleus of the comet
before the formation of the solar system.
♪♪
Parker: We were able to see molecules,
some of which had never been seen before.
For instance, glycine, the amino acid,
a building block of life.
Accomazzo: And if the oxygen was trapped in the nucleus
before the formation of the solar system,
then, also, the amino acids were trapped there.
If these two things, which are the ingredients of life,
were trapped there before the formation of the solar system,
they are not specific to our solar system,
so the likelihood that life has formed
somewhere else as well.
♪♪
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
♪♪
So, on rosetta, we had a dozen instruments
and not all of these instruments take pictures.
♪♪
They get data in different ways.
♪♪
We were able to see molecules,
some of which had never been seen before.
For instance, glycine, the amino acid,
a building block of life.
♪♪
Ferri: This confirmation is very important
because it shows that comets could have been the objects
that brought the components of life onto earth.
♪♪
As we had been with the comet for more than two years,
we were moving back out again away from the sun.
♪♪
Accomazzo: The mission had accomplished all the results.
Nobody had thought about how to finish the mission.
♪♪
Ferri: Shall we hibernate again,
taking the risk of a much longer hibernation?
♪♪
Shall we switch it off in September,
that's it, bye-bye, rosetta?
♪♪
Then, we propose to land
with the mother ship on the comet.
It's not designed for landing,
but this was taken as a good idea
because this would allow us to observe and measure
the last few kilometers, where we had never been.
♪♪
Mccaughrean: The decision was, indeed, taken to say,
"let's go down. Let's do it."
♪♪
Parker: And so we got closer and closer,
getting more and more detailed images
than we had ever had before.
♪♪
Only a few days before the end of the mission...
Right there, at the edge of the image, was a shape.
You could see there, in a sort of crack
in between some rocks on the comet, in shadow.
Finally, we got a picture of philae
on the surface of the comet.
♪♪
Good morning. Morgen. Bonjour.
Bienvenue, welcome,
for rosetta's grand finale.
We are here, live,
in rosetta control room at esoc in Germany.
So, by this point in September,
we had planned to put rosetta down onto the comet.
Woman: It is a special day today.
The European space agency's comet-chasing rosetta mission
is coming to an end.
It will be the end of a mission
that lasted 4,595 days in space.
Everything we had put into this, in terms of the human story,
but the science, this several-decade-long effort
was coming to an end and we were choosing to do it.
And even sitting here, now, several years later,
I mean, it brings back those emotions.
♪♪
We commanded the spacecraft to do the final plunge
down to the surface of the comet.
♪♪
Woman: The spacecraft is taking images during the descent.
♪♪
Ferri: We could see some of the images and we could see the surface
coming closer and closer and time passing by
and we knew that the mission was coming to an end.
♪♪
Parker: It got closer and closer.
♪♪
'Til, finally...
♪♪
...we lost contact.
And that was the end of rosetta.
♪♪
When the signal shut down on that day,
people were shellshocked.
I mean, even though they knew it was coming.
But I remember walking around the corridors,
people just leaning up against walls,
just staring into the distance.
♪♪
It was -- yeah, I mean, it's something
[ crying ] Those of us who were involved will never forget.
♪♪
It was --
It was quite an adventure.
♪♪
Our understanding of how asteroids and comets
might contribute to our existence --
We know the kind of rocks that appear on the surface.
We know the minerals in those rocks.
We know about the organic molecules.
We know about the water.
None of these things, we would've learned
by looking at asteroids and comets from a distance.
♪♪
Each time we further our knowledge,
we get a little bit closer
to the story of "where did we come from?"
♪♪