Touchdown

SPACE exploration is a serious scientific business. But ever since the beginning of the Space Age in the 1950s, it has been accompanied by a hefty dose of glitz and PR. Two years ago, Earthlings watched with bated breath as a one-tonne, nuclear-powered, laser-armed robot rover fizzed through the Martian atmosphere, before being deposited gently on the surface by a rocket-powered “skycrane”. The distance between Mars and Earth meant that the mission’s controllers had to wait seven agonising minutes to find out whether the rover had survived the journey. Their fingernail biting was broadcast live by NASA. When news arrived of a successful landing, they whooped, hugged and lit cigars.

This week, it was the turn of the European Space Agency (ESA) to put on a show. In August, after ten years blazing a circuitous trail through the solar system, including three fly-bys of Earth, one of Mars, two trips through the asteroid belt and a two-and-a-half year hibernation in the chilly void beyond Jupiter, its spacecraft Rosetta caught up with 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a 4km-wide comet. Rosetta will spend a year orbiting this comet, hitching a ride as it plunges towards the sun.