Rosetta Chasing Down a Comet: 100 kilometres to 'touchdown'

The Rosetta spacecraft is approaching just 100 kilometres from its target comet, "Chury," today. After a ten-year journey, the Bernese instrument, ROSINA, will soon "smell" the first molecules of the comet's gas tail.

"We have reached comet Chury's orbit around the sun," says Kathrin Altwegg from the Centre for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern. Altwegg is the project leader for the ROSINA instrument, which was developed at the CSH and is designed to analyse the gases coming from the comet. ROSINA consists of two mass spectrometers and a pressure sensor and should, amongst other things, answer the question of whether comets brought water and organic molecules to Earth. Organic molecules formed the basic building blocks for the development of life on Earth.