Yang’s answer? “Erm, no.” with those two words, Lieutenant Colonel Yang dispelled a modern myth which has become a staple of pub quizzes, been repeated in schools and even found its way into the Trivial Pursuit game.
Yang’s answer came as no surprise to NASA, whose astronauts have said for decades that all that can be seen is the white of clouds, the blue of the oceans, the yellow of deserts and a few green patches of vegetation. Despite being 1,500 miles (2,400km) long and 30ft wide at the base, the wall cannot be seen at all.
It is unclear where the myth began, but some at NASA believe that it started with some boastful after-dinner claims during the early days of the manned space programme.
There was some consolation for China, and for the rest of us, from Yang, however. Asked how Earth looked from orbit, he replied: “It’s truly beautiful.”
2014: the Rosetta space odyssey
On 2 March 2004 a European spacecraft that will chase down a comet in search of clues to the origin of life on Earth lifted off from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. An Ariane-5 rocket carrying a European Space Agency probe set course for the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The Rosetta probe will take 12 years to catch the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. When it does it will become the first spacecraft to make a soft, controlled landing on the nucleus of one of the solar system’s enigmatic icy wanderers.
The mission aims to unlock the secrets of the solar system’s beginnings 4.6 billion years ago, of which comets are largely unchanged relics, containing the same materials from which the planets were formed.
It will answer important questions about what the “dirty snowballs” are made of, and even whether comets could have “seeded” Earth with the water and organic chemicals required for the genesis of life.
Rosetta will use three Earth fly-bys and another of Mars as a “gravity slingshot” to catapult it towards Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which has a core about the size of Heathrow Airport.
On completing its 7 billon-mile journey in 2014, Rosetta will orbit the comet’s nucleus and drop a lander named Philae, the size of a washing machine, on to its surface.
The mother ship takes its name from the Rosetta Stone which was discovered in Egypt in 1799 and provided the first key to deciphering hieroglyphics. Scientists hope the data it gathers will offer equally critical insights to the origins of the solar system and terrestrial life. Its Philae lander is named after an island in the Nile where an obelisk critical to the understanding of the Rosetta Stone was found.
The probe was delayed several times because of problems with the Ariane-5 rocket and had originally been scheduled to visit a different comet, named Wirtanen. The European Space Agency changed its target when the Wirtanen launch window was missed early in 2003.
Britain has contributed ?70 million towards the probe’s ?600 million cost, and it was partially built by the Stevenage-based satellite company EADS-Astrium. British scientists have also contributed to 11 of the 21 instruments it will fly.
Professor Ian Halliday, chief executive of the Partide Physics and Astronomy Research Council, said:
“This mission will turn science fiction into science fact. Every aspect of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko will be analysed, resulting in the most comprehensive set of scientific measurements ever obtained of a comet and the UK can be justly proud of the significant part it has played. This ground-breaking mission benefits from considerable involvement by talented scientists from UK universities.”
Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the Science Minister, said:
“It is hoped the Rosetta mission will provide us with an understanding of the origins of the Sun and the planets, including Earth. It could provide answers to how life actually began.”
Rosetta will start orbiting the comet in May 2014. Once it has identified a landing site, it will release Philae, which will hit the ground at walking speed.
Philae will drill into the comet’s core to take samples, and take close-up pictures, thus becoming the first probe to make a controlled landing on a comet. A NASA spacecraft to be launched in December, named Deep Impact, will crash into a comet in 2005, but will be destroyed in the process.
Both the European lander and orbiter will operate for more than a year, collecting information on the comet’s composition, and on the way in which its icy core starts to melt as it approaches the sun.
One British-led experiment, named Ptolemy, will analyse the chemical composition of samples from the comet’s core. If these match those found on Earth, it would be possible that water and organic materials first reached Earth on comets.
Ian Wright of the Open University, principal investigator for Ptolemy, said:
“The study of these biologically important elements is strongly implicated in our quest to understand the origin of life on Earth.”
The oldest stars ever seen
On 10 March 2004 The Times reported that the Hubble telescope has peered deeper into space than ever before to picture the Universe in the flush of youth. It had captured images of stars which are more than 76,254,048,000,000,000,000,000 miles from Earth.
Their light was generated more than 13 billion years ago, and has taken that long to reach Hubble. The light from Mars, which is at present more than 125 million miles from Earth, takes ten minutes to reach us. The images open a window on to some of the oldest objects ever seen, many of which were formed 400 million years after the Big Bang, approximately 14 billion years ago.
Masilmo Stiavelli of the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute said:
“Hubble takes us to within a stone’s throw of the Big Bang itself.”
Astronomers are now combing the pictures for the galaxies that date back to when the Universe was emerging from a mysterious era known as the cosmic “dark ages”.
Appendix – Space, Fact and Fiction
The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters has an additional theme running through it. This theme is the interaction of fact and fiction. Science fiction has inspired numerous scientists. Later some of these scientists made that fiction into reality. Many pioneering rocket scientists were inspired by the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon was published in 1865 and was
