From ScienceDaily:
“With Rosetta we are opening a door to the origin of planet Earth and fostering a better understanding of our future. ESA and its Rosetta mission partners have achieved something extraordinary today.”
“After more than 10 years travelling through space, we’re now making the best ever scientific analysis of one of the oldest remnants of our Solar System,” said Alvaro Giménez, ESA’s Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.
“Decades of preparation have paved the way for today’s success, ensuring that Rosetta continues to be a game-changer in cometary science and space exploration.”
“We are extremely relieved to be safely on the surface of the comet, especially given the extra challenges that we faced with the health of the lander,” said Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center.
“In the next hours we’ll learn exactly where and how we’ve landed, and we’ll start getting as much science as we can from the surface of this fascinating world.”
Interesting that a lifeless interplanetary body is described as a “world” and the lander is considered to have “health.”
Humans cannot really get away from thinking like this, can we? 😉
Also, from European Space Agency:
Comet 67P is one of numerous short period comets which have orbital periods of less than 20 years and a low orbital inclination. Since their orbits are controlled by Jupiter’s gravity, they are also called Jupiter Family comets.
From Laszlo Bencze,
“It is hoped the project will inform us of who we are and where we came from.”
These words wrap up a video presentation I just viewed on the Internet. Once again we see a statement of faith which so permeates our world that no one notices it IS a faith statement, a metaphysical proposition, a religious credo. Just about everyone accepts the notion of bottom up creation implicit in the statement. Of course we come from the raw materials of which we are made as everyone agrees. If these raw materials happen to be abundant on comets, then it is perfectly reasonable to say we come from comets. Comets are our ancestors in a long, unbroken lineage that makes perfect scientific sense. Randomness is the ideal creator in this material chain of being because randomness can have no purpose, no morality, no restriction, no meaning. Hence randomness explains a meaningless world perfectly. But what randomness does not explain is why we would have a sense of it being a perfect explanation? What is it that tells us randomness is the answer? What is it informs us there are any answers? In fact, why do we even have questions?
As Robert Spitzer points out in his book New Proofs for the Existence of God, this desire for complete knowledge coupled with the fact that we as humans “know that we do not know” points towards a divine essence of complete intelligibility and unrestricted understanding which is a backdrop to our thinking. This is the Great Designer who not only creates the raw materials of our universe but assembles them into the complex structures capable of housing souls who are dim reflections of their creator. That is “who we are and where we came from.”
See also: In search of a road to reality
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