No I haven’t, most of my work is more focused on looking at Earth from space. There was a mission called Rosetta where a space probe visited a comet and landed a robot called Pilae on it in 2014.
Hi WinstageN – great question. As Harriet says we have landed on comet 67P once before with the Rosetta mission. I just wanted to add there is a new European Space Agency mission called CometInterceptor which is going to go another comet in 2028. Comets can either come from the Kuiper belt into the inner solar system or from the Oort cloud. The Kuiper belt is a region beyond Neptune in space where lots of small objects are left over from the formation of the Solar System.. the Oort cloud is simular, but even further out into space behind Pluto. Scientist want to study comets because they can tell us a lot about how the solar system formed. But they are very dangerous objects to go and visit – the Oort is very cold, but as a comet comes closer to the Sun it will warm up and bits of it will start to melt. This will cause parts of the comet to fall off and fly around the comet often at high speed. A spacecraft going to a comet must be built like a tank as it will get bombarded with objects that have broken off the comet. It is making CometInterceptor very hard to design! You can find out more about CometInterceptor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0SMNucXwgo
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Tris commented on :
Hi WinstageN – great question. As Harriet says we have landed on comet 67P once before with the Rosetta mission. I just wanted to add there is a new European Space Agency mission called CometInterceptor which is going to go another comet in 2028. Comets can either come from the Kuiper belt into the inner solar system or from the Oort cloud. The Kuiper belt is a region beyond Neptune in space where lots of small objects are left over from the formation of the Solar System.. the Oort cloud is simular, but even further out into space behind Pluto. Scientist want to study comets because they can tell us a lot about how the solar system formed. But they are very dangerous objects to go and visit – the Oort is very cold, but as a comet comes closer to the Sun it will warm up and bits of it will start to melt. This will cause parts of the comet to fall off and fly around the comet often at high speed. A spacecraft going to a comet must be built like a tank as it will get bombarded with objects that have broken off the comet. It is making CometInterceptor very hard to design! You can find out more about CometInterceptor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0SMNucXwgo