One of the strangest phenomena encountered by scientists from the European Space Agency during the landing of the Philae on comet 67P or Churyumov-Gerasimenko, was the recording of a series of unexpected, as well as mysterious, magnetic oscillations. "For a celestial body to have a magnetic field, it needs to have mass, a conductive core and rotate at speed. We did not expect to encounter such characteristics in comets," says Yiannis Dagklis, professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Athens and scientific manager of one of the experiments of Rosetta, the spacecraft that managed to reach a comet for the first time in the history of scientific exploration.
The scientific reason why scientists burst into applause and cheers when the robot landed on the surface of 67P was because they hoped to collect and analyze the chemical composition of the materials that make up it. Comets are considered carriers of primordial matter with a decisive role in the formation of planets. The observation of organic compounds, for example, could provide valuable evidence for the creation of life on Earth.
But Rosetta is also a story of amazing technological success for Europe, which for the first time surpasses NASA in boldness and originality and as such hides secrets. Like a Greek scientific innovation, which played a decisive role in a Greek team being among the scientists celebrating success today.
In 2008, ESA announced a competition for the construction of a high-energy particle detector, which, in violation of the regulations, would be built and operated by itself and its purpose would be to establish a system for protecting experiments on the satellite. According to its statute, ESA provides the rocket, the satellite and the mission monitoring facilities, but the experiments loaded on the spacecraft are approved after competitive tenders and are financed by national funds. “Greece certainly avoids doing such programs, since the crisis has dried up the relevant funds, but the announcement of the program by ESA gave us the idea to develop a more detailed program for managing the detector, which would allow for better operation and scientific observations,” explains Yiannis Dagklis.
Indeed, the team of researchers working at the University of Athens and the Athens Observatory performed a small miracle, building a management system so good that it is used both for the safety of the spacecraft and for conducting scientific experiments. It also managed to transmit this data processed in real time to the other scientific teams. ESA adopted the technology, which it now uses in all its missions! “Our system won the relevant competition and is now being applied in three other missions, while we expect two more to follow,” says Yiannis Dagklis.
Here we should perhaps explain that Yannis Daglis is not an “accidental” scientist. Having served for many years as director of the Institute of Space Studies of the Athens Observatory, national representative of Greece to the European Space Agency and member of the expert committees that design or judge the Agency’s own programs, he knew in which direction to direct his scientific team.
To this day, the space robot the size of a washing machine, which has clung to the shadow of a rock on P67, with two legs on it and the third dangling, worries scientists. If it fails to hook, then it may not be able to use its drill and collect materials, since using it can launch it far from its weak gravitational field. But both Yannis Dagklis and all the ESA scientists consider the mission a success. “The approach was difficult, the landing was considered impossible. That we got this far was not expected by any of us. Then, a space program is never designed with an exclusive purpose, such as the study of comets in this case. This is only the main scientific object. Behind this, ESA is testing, among other things, landing techniques for a mission to Mars.”.
Source: kathimerini.gr
