Astronautics & Astronomy - a Profitable Partnership

Abstract

T he connection between Astronautics and Astronomy is naturally straightforward. Astronomy is one of the oldest scientific areas of the human development, for thousands of years. On the other side, Astronautics is much younger (a few centuries), but it actually started in the dreams and in the poetic literature well before we have had technology to accomplish a remarkable fact as the launching of the first artificial satellite in orbit of the Earth.Since then, more than half century ago, a huge number of artificial satellites have been launched. They are used for all kind of Earth monitoring, searching, communicating etc. They became a need for the current modern society. They became so important that in the last decades we started to worry about the space debris we produce and the threat they make on the indispensable new satellites to come.Together with all that, we live on what has been called "The Space Age", the time of space exploration. Soon after the first artificial satellites we had probes sent to the Moon and to other nearby planets. Then, the fantastic race to the Moon has occurred, which provoked a significant technological advancement and also produced scientific knowledge. The rocks brought from the Moon induced a different thought about its origin. Information on their mineral and chemical composition produced models showing that our Moon could have been created from a giant impact between a Mars-size body (called Theia) and the proto-Earth.Afterwards, the space exploration kept increasing. Initially there were spacecraft that made flybys on the planets (as the Voyager I and II, for example). Then, in the last decades, the long-duration explorations have started. A very good example is the Cassini/Huygens mission, which is exploring the Saturnian system (Saturn, its rings and moons) for about ten years. The spacecraft is very sophisticated, with a large number of state-of-the-art instruments. It also carried a probe that was dropped collecting data through the atmosphere of Titan (the largest satellite). These data is helping to build models in order to try to understand how the atmosphere of our planet was in the past. There has been so many incredible space missions to Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, the Sun, asteroids… Just along the last 12 months there were (and they are still going on) two amazing missions: Rosetta and New Horizons.The comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is being explored by the spacecraft Rosetta, which also carried a probe named Philae. The probe was placed on the surface of its nucleus to make measurements on its site, while the spacecraft is maintained nearby the comet (making other kinds of measurements). This comet is a small highly-irregular shaped body (far away from a spheroid body) with a largest axis of about six kilometers and a shortest axis of about two kilometers. Then, after a ten-year journey, being at a distance of about three times the Sun-Earth distance, they managed to place Philae, a hundred-kilogram probe, on the surface of this comet.The New Horizons mission has...