Rosetta – Space Mission to a Comet

Nearly 20 years ago, in early 2004 the Rosetta spacecraft was launched and began its long odyssey to its ultimate destination which was to rendezvous with a cometary nucleus in August 2014.  The talk will discuss the various technical challenges facing the engineering team during the design phase which were driven by its unique journey around the Solar System.

This talk will be given by Dr Nigel Wright who was the Engineering Manager for the Rosetta spacecraft platform during the design phase in the late 1990’s.  Nigel was also the Project Director for the UK’s scientific experiment (Ptolemy) on the Rosetta Lander. 

Nigel has spent over 37 years working on various scientific spacecraft missions including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Planck mission to map the Cosmic Microwave Background and Mars Express/Beagle 2 as well as a number of European Earth Observation missions (ERS-2, ENVISAT and EarthCARE) aimed at understanding the Earth’s climate.  His final project prior to his retirement in 2022 was the Multi-Angle Polarimeter instrument onboard a series of Copernicus CO2M spacecraft. The CO2M mission is concerned with the monitoring of anthropogenic CO₂ production.