Filters for Applications in Space - Rosetta Mission: Europe’s Comet Chaser

LASER COMPONENTS supplied a network of telescopes with “comet filters” in preparation for Rosetta’s comet-chasing mission. These are astronomical narrow band optical filters with centre wavelengths between 308 nm and 684 nm with bandwidths between 4 nm and 12 nm. These telescopes help create a global network to be set up that delivers data for comet target identification and has proved to be of great value, in particular during an extremely critical phase of the project.

Originally the “Wirtanen” comet was the intended rendezvous for Rosetta, but delays in providing a launch vehicle led scientists to select another target and chose the “67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko” comet. 

As many know the robotic space probe Rosetta arrived at the comet in August after a ten year flight in space, passing by Mars in 2007 then two other asteroids in 2008 and 2010 respectively, to gain appropriate speed and trajectory to reach 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

This comet is “fresh” and produces large amounts of dust and gas. For the first time in the history of space research a probe landed on a comet. A small lander called Philae left Rosetta to land on the comet to take measurements on site.  Unfortunately it is thought that harpoons failed to operate that were intended to anchor the probe and instead it bounced on impact then landed in an unfavourable location and orientation to charge its batteries via its solar panels.  After performing some experiments the batteries drained.

Despite this setback the Rosetta comet chaser was the most ambitious space mission to be started in Europe, and we are proud to have contributed to this mission.