BERLIN — It’s been likened to a parachutist trying to land on a mountaintop. Or attempting to leap from one speeding car to another.
The European Space Agency is planning to land an unmanned spacecraft on a comet next year in an unprecedented and exquisitely tricky mission that has been underway for nearly a decade. The agency announced Tuesday that its Rosetta probe, launched in 2004, will be awakened from hibernation next month and will aim to drop a lander onto the icy surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Nov. 11, 2014.
“Nobody has ever done this before,” said Paolo Ferri, head of mission operations at the European Space Agency.
To catch 67P as it orbits the sun at up to 62,000 mph, Rosetta has used several fly-bys of Earth, Mars and the sun to accelerate.
