ESA's Next Mission: Capitalizing on Success of Philae

摘要

Landing the Philae probe on the surface of a comet 500 million kilometers from Earth after a 10-year voyage that included 30 months of satellite hibernation is a made-in-Europe masterstroke - all the more striking given how few thought it would work. Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan - an aphorism that might explain the absence of many high-ranking political officials at the various landing events. The odds, after all, were that Philae would fail. Political calculus would argue against taking the risk of associating too closely with it. French President Francois Hollande was a notable exception, attending an event in Paris with the French space minister and the head of the French space agency, CNES, despite the fact that Philae and its Rosetta comet-chaser satellite are not French-dominated missions.