Powered By The Sun #1: The Rosetta Mission - Part 1

Hello and welcome to the first installment of our new series Powered By The Sun, exploring the ways solar energy is being used in our time as we progress towards a future powered by the light and heat generated by the sun.  Occasionally, this series will cover live events where soar and other renewable energy sources are either the focus or play an important role in the story.

We begin this series with just such a live event which will actually be unfolding over the next couple of weeks (c. October 25 - November 15, 2014).  The thing that makes this event so exciting is that it is something that has never been done before by a man-made machine that has travelled billions of miles at speeds up to 84,000 miles per hour and is powered electrically by solar cells.  The deep space craft called Rosetta has made the epic journey to rendevous with a comet - and to land a probe on the surface of said comet!  And solar energy will help make it all possible.

If you are not familiar with this awesome deep space exploration and discovery mission, please check out the video below to get a brief summary overview of the what the Rosetta Mission is all about. See you in 9 minutes...

The most fascinating current space exploration of our solar system is the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, launched in 2004 to investigate comet 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko with a spacecraft that will for the first time rendevous with a comet as it approaches the Sun and land on its nucleus.

Now that you are caught up with what Rosetta is and what its mission is, we'll take a look in our next post at what Rosetta is currently doing at the comet and we'll learn about how energy from the sun is used to power Rosetta's instruments and how solar energy contributes to the success of this first-ever human space exploration endeavor.