Can the inertia of a spacecraft be used when landing on a comet?"
A team led by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, have tested in the laboratory, a simple and robust solution for anchoring a similar sized spacecraft to Philae onto the surface of a comet or asteroid. The method uses a large spike, fixed to the base of the spacecraft, in place of the landing legs. The spike is pushed into the surface via the spacecraft's inertia alone and could in principle hold the spacecraft in place. It was found the device could penetrate analogue asteroid and comet surfaces, including a hard cometary crust-like material. The impactor was also used to measure the hardness of the material it was penetrating.
Such a device, fitted out with an array of instruments, could be attached to small, mass-produced, satellites and a fleet of them could be sent to survey the asteroid and comet population. This would help understand the threat from asteroids and comets, perform important Solar System science and map comet and asteroid properties for future mining activities.
More information about asteroids and comets needed
Meteors appear as streaks of light in the night sky caused by high speed grains of dust burning up in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Occasionally a space rock, from an asteroid or a comet, will streak through the atmosphere as a fireball, landing on the Earth's surface as a meteorite.
Rarely, perhaps once every hundred years, a rock collides with the Earth, that is large enough to cause significant environmental damage. It is important to quantify the threat of these objects by determining their strength and so determine if any could reach the surface intact or explode in the atmosphere. This can only be done by visiting an asteroid or comet. For example last November the European Space Agency Philae spacecraft, that was expected to land in a thick layer of dust, instead bounced several times on a harder than expected surface.
Research was done in collaboration between FMI and the Open University in the UK.
More information:
Researcher Mark Paton, mark.paton@fmi.fi