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At This Hour

European Probe Lands on Comet; European Space Agency Director: "Big Step for Human Civilization"

Aired November 12, 2014 - 10:53   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN HOST: Hello there, everyone. I'm John Berman.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN HOST: And I'm Michaela Pereira.

A very special welcome to all of our viewers watching across the country and around the world.

Well, this is quite a moment. It's a bit like -- being described a bit like a bullet hitting a bullet -- the analogy from the lips of Bill Nye "The Science Guy".

The European Space Agency, well they're trying to drop a lander roughly the size of a washing machine on to the surface of a moving comet. As you can imagine, it's amazingly difficult. We're showing you a little animation right here. Philae has -- the name of the lander -- has orbited attached to the Rosetta for the past decade waiting for this very moment. Scientists are hoping this lander loaded with a portable chemistry lab of making an atometer and other instruments. They're hoping it will help answer some ultimate questions.

Where did life come from? Are we alone in the solar system -- John?

BERMAN: You're never alone because I'm here with you. The probe however was released about seven hours ago and it was sort of sent on a freefall. It was just dropped. Scientists have no ability to steer it, only the very, very weak gravity of the comet is pulling it ever closer toward the surface of the comet.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAOLO FERRI, MISSION LANDER, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY: A landing has never been tried on such a small body. So everything is new for us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: And again, if we have not stated clearly, this is happening right now. This thing is due to set down within minutes and it's never happened before. You are part of intergalactic history right now. How is this probe going to about attaching itself to this comet flying at 41,000 miles per hour?

Our Frederik Pleitgen is standing by live in mission control in Darmstadt, Germany where scientists are directing this amazing experiment. Fred, what's going on?

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey guys. Yes, I'm standing by and once again I have my models and one of the things that we have to point out is that if everything has gone according to plan, this thing has already set down on the comet. However, because it's about 350 million miles away, it takes the signal that this thing hopefully will transmit or has already transmitted after landing about half an hour to reach earth. And so we're expecting the signal if everything is going according to plan at approximately, I would say, 11:05 Eastern time.

Now, what this thing does is it goes very close to the comet and it drops down very, very slowly because while this thing weighs a hundred kilograms or about 300 pounds on earth it only weighs one gram in space. So it's going very slowly and once it gets very close to the comet guys, what it does is it launches harpoons to try and attach itself to the comet. Because what we have to keep in mind is that because this comet is so small it has almost no gravitational field and that's why this thing is very light.

And if it doesn't have the harpoons, if the harpoons don't deploy then, it will just bounce back into space and it will be lost.

Now, there's other pitfalls that could happen as well because they don't really know what the makeup of the surface of the comet is. They know the comet is almost a little bit like a dirty icy snowball. It's made of ice, it's made of rock, it's made of minerals, but they don't know whether there's crevasses on the surface or whether or not there might be any sort of other things that could cause it to topple when it lands. So these are all things that are not in their control.

As John just said, they simply drop this thing out of Rosetta, they calculated the path it's supposed to take and now they're hoping that it lands exactly like this and will be able to transmit signals back to earth and the first one hopefully at about five minutes past the hour if everything goes according to plan. But again we're dealing with distances of about 350 million miles so if it's a minute late, I think we'll all be all right, won't we?

PEREIRA: We'll forgive it. Assuming that space cooperates, I want to bring in a couple of other voices. That was an excellent show and tell for us, Fred, I love the models. You did a great job.

Let's bring in Miles O'Brien, our space analyst. Also joining us -- it just Miles with us? Oh there he is, Hakeem, he's joining us, Oluseyi -- he's a professor and host of "Outrageous Acts" on the Science Channel. Really good to have you both. Miles, I'm going to start with you because I think it's so interesting to look at this model that Fred is showing us and have to realize that there's so many things that have to line up just perfectly -- so many calculations. We have to keep in mind that that comet that this little dishwasher- sized machine is about to land on is moving at a really high rate of speed.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN SPACE ANALYST: Yes. It does one full revolution about every 12 hours so it's a moving target. What's interesting about this, too, is when we looked at this particular comet through telescopes it looked like it was kind of an oblong circular blob. But as Rosetta has homed in on it, it became evidence it's more like a giant rubber ducky about two and a half miles across.

That just makes the challenge that much harder because it's got all these angles and cliffs and boulders and this is a little device, this little Philae, it's just dropping on -- by virtue of the gravity -- the faint gravitational pull of the comet.

And I keep thinking of it as like Moby Dick trying to harpoon the whale here. Because if it doesn't latch on, if you and I were standing on this comet right and we took a decent little jump, we would just keep going. So there's not enough gravity there to keep it there. So it has a harpoon, it's got to screw itself in.

And one thing that's worth thinking about here is there's one rocket on this lander which is designed to push it down on to the comet and keep it there. It's not working, apparently. So this is going to be a little bit of a nail biter. They have other systems to keep it there, but that rocket is an important piece of the prize here. So we'll see.

BERMAN: Yes, that thruster this morning, they got word that it was not working. Still they decided to go ahead with the drop because, frankly, what else are you going to do?

PEREIRA: What else are you going to do? Wait another 10 years.

BERMAN: Let her rip.

O'BRIEN: You've waited ten years for this thing. Let it go.

PEREIRA: Keep an eye out for a giant rubber duck floating through space?

BERMAN: And hopefully those clamps will work.

Professor, I think you're still here with us. Professor, explain to us why this is such an important mission. It's not just about the comet. It's about us, too, isn't it?

HAKEEM OLUSEYI, SCIENCE CHANNEL HOST: That's right. And I think the clue is right there in the name of the mission itself, Rosetta -- right. So Rosetta holds the key, perhaps, to understanding something about ourselves, something about the evolution of our solar system. We have organic compounds here on earth and they're associated with life. Well, we have remotely detected organic compounds from comets in the past and other places throughout the cosmos.

But this is going to be the first time that we can directly sample the material of a comet and test it right there in the laboratory in the little washing machine that we've been talking about.

PEREIRA: Well, we want to just re-welcome everyone to CNN. It's @THISHOUR WITH BERMAN AND MICHAELA. I'm the Michaela part, he's the Berman and we're watching this very special moment as we invite our viewers from around the country and around the globe to join us.

We're waiting for the first images to be sent back to Earth from far above our atmosphere where a lander has just landed on a moving comet. I giggle a little bit because it seems like science fiction, John.

BERMAN: Indeed it is. This has never happened before. We're talking about 300 million miles away from Earth.

A comet, the sexily named 67-P.

PEREIRA: Come on now.

BERMAN: I can think of better names than that.

But still, that comet is moving at 41,000 miles an hour right now. This Philae refrigerator-sized probe has as far as we know already landed on it within the last few minutes, but because of the delay in time --

PEREIRA: About 30 minutes.

BERMAN: -- we are waiting to see the very first picture. Until we get that first picture, I suppose we will not know for sure that this mission was successful.

PEREIRA: But here's the thing. There's several aspects of this that make it so exciting. The fact that they're even doing it to begin with -- and that's where I want to bring if maybe Miles and Hakeem again if we can.

Miles, the fact we're even able to do this in 2014, that speaks to much progress that has been made in terms of our ability to explore outer space.

O'BRIEN: Yeah. Of course, we still haven't done it yet so let's not hex it. Let's not hex it, Michaela.

PEREIRA: That's fair enough. Fair enough.

O'BRIEN: We've gotten close but the devil is in the details, especially as you get closer to the rock that's spinning, so we'll watch this and see how it goes/

But, yes, this is a hard thing to do. That's why we haven't done it heretofore. We've done missions to comets. Star Dust is a famous one that sailed through the tail of a comet and brought back some of those pieces to Earth.

But this is the absolute makings of us. Basically, the shower you took this morning was from a comet, essentially. All the water on this planet, pretty much all the water on this planet, scientists now believe came from comets.

And when the Big Bang happened four and a half -- excuse me, when our solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago, this is kind of the leftover stuff that didn't make it -- the cut, if you will, into becoming a planet or what we are right now. And it's been in a freezer.

So it's like cold storage for what life -- what was going on four and a half billion years ago. So if you want to find out our origins, and maybe the really big question, are we alone, this is the great place to look, and that's why landing here is so exciting.

BERMAN: And, Professor, just to keep everyone abreast of the situation right now, we are minutes away from perhaps getting our very first pictures from a spacecraft that has landed on a comet. That comet about 300 million miles away from Earth right now --

PEREIRA: What's its velocity, roughly?

BERMAN: -- moving at speeds of 45,000 miles an hour.

We hope that the spacecraft has already landed on the comet. We are now waiting for the pictures to be sent back to us and those could come, again, at any moment.

You know, it struck me you were saying we have the technology today to do this. That's almost inaccurate. We had the technology ten years ago to do this --

PEREIRA: Sure.

BERMAN: -- because that's when this all launched.

PEREIRA: Sharp point.

BERMAN: And they haven't done much those ten years except wait.

This has got to be so hard to wait this long for a moment like this, Professor.

OLUSEYI: Yes. And not only that, science experiments in space fail because space is a very hostile environment, and we've already had one small failure with this mission/

And hopefully, you know, when we get to the surface, and like it's been said, it's probably very already there, we don't know what we're going to find. What are the details of the terrain this lander is going to have to face? Will it be a smooth surface?

Luckily it's small so it won't be that subject. I think I hear good news on that end.

PEREIRA: We are seeing some live pictures, so I'm assuming -- and maybe Fred Pleitgen we can bring you in. We're seeing a lot of celebration going on at the European Space Agency, some clapping, people patting each other on the back.

Fred, are you able to give us an idea of what they've seen or what they've learned?

PLEITGEN: Judging from what I'm seeing here from this vantage point, it looks like they've got the signal from outer space. It looks like this is exactly what they were waiting for.

Now, they're not going to get a picture yet. The first thing they're going to get is they're going to get a signal from the Philae lander that it is on the planet.

Now I have Claudio Sollazzo here. He has landed on the Saturn moon Titan. What does all this mean that we're seeing here right now, Claudio?

CLAUDIO SOLLAZZO, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY: We're essentially seeing the moment in which we received from Philae via Rosetta the information that the lander has actually landed on the comet and it's -- everything so far seems to be good and stable.

We need a bit more time to find out the conditions and how it landed and what the situation around the lander is, but everybody seems to be very happy. And I think we should be because it's the first time we land on a comet.

ESA, in particular it's been able to achieve two landings in two very, very strange places. One was Titan ten years ago, and now the comet.

PLEITGEN: So eventually what we've done, what humanity has done now is we have caught a comet. We're now on a comet. And we're waiting to hear the first announcement in just a couple of minutes.

But essentially we know now that we have received -- I'm going back to the model here -- a signal from the Philae lander that's transmitted to the Rosetta probe and is then transmitted back to Earth.

We don't know if this has sank into the surface. We don't know if it's correctly standing on its feet. But it's there and working. Is that right?

SOLLAZZO: This we can confirm at the moment. More details will come later. We need a lot of information.

Philae is transmitting data from the comet to Rosetta to show how the status of its own systems is. So we will later know how it actually is landed, if it's anchored in a horizontal or in some other orientation and if all the mechanisms that keep -- will keep the lander attached to Rosetta -- sorry, to the comet for all the time -- it worked well. I think there what I see that we have good confirmation for all of it.

The mechanisms actually do act within few seconds after the touchdown. The touchdown happens at a speed of about one meter per second, which is essentially the speed of a man walking.

But the comet is so small that the gravity is very, very small itself. It's like 100,000 times smaller than the gravity we have here on Earth. So even as light touch on the comet might rebound the lander away from it, so there are at least three mechanisms that have had to work -- and they seem to have worked -- that keep the comet attached.

One is, in the three legs, there are some harpoons, screws that have been pushed into the screws of the comet. Then two harpoons that have been deployed, and they've sank into the comet for up to two meters they could have gone in. We don't know yet how much.

And then the third thing is from the top of the lander a small thruster should have fired for a few seconds to make sure that the lander stays in place.

PLEITGEN: All right, Claudio, thank you very much for that.

So we already know that we've achieved something or that ESA has achieved something amazing and now we are going to find out more information and give that to you the moment we get it, guys.

BERMAN: We can't wait for that information. We can't wait for those photos, either.

We did, however, already get a tweet from the Philae lander, which tweeted, "Touchdown! My new address is 67-P!" That, of course, is the name of the comet some 300 million miles away from Earth, hurtling at speeds of 40,000 miles per hour.

PEREIRA: It's going to take more than a forever stamp.

BERMAN: What an event. We're joined here in studio by Tariq Malik, managing editor of Space.com.

What a moment. Again, this is the first time that a spacecraft has ever made a soft landing like this on a comet.

TARIQ MALIK, MANAGING EDITOR, SPACE.COM: You know, Berman, you're right. This -- it is very rare that you have a moment where something built by people has landed on something completely new and alien. And this is one of those moments.

We've seen it decades ago with Mars. We saw it just ten years ago with Saturn's moon, Titan, and now we can say that there's a spacecraft riding a comet 300 million miles from Earth.

PEREIRA: Part of the marvel is what we're hoping to learn, right? But then the other aspect of an accomplishment like this is what we don't know we're going to learn.

MALIK: That's exactly right. So we know comets are made out of dust and ice and rock. We know that they may have brought water to Earth, maybe even the building blocks for all of the life we see around us.

What we don't know is what else is in there. This comet is coming from the outer edges of the solar system. It's on its way into the sun. It's going to wake up while the spacecraft is on the surface, while the Rosetta probe is watching it in action.

We're going to see a lot of new things just by watching and tagging along with the comet that we wouldn't ever have seen before.

BERMAN: And, Miles O'Brien, if you're still with us, my understanding is that these next two days on the comet are really super important.

That's when it will have its auxiliary power -- you can see them just going bonkers in Germany right now. They're very excited at the European Space Agency as they're getting the first signals back from the Philae lander, which is now on the comet.

Man, I can't wait to see the pictures this thing sends back. These guys are so excited about it.

O'BRIEN: Really. If we're excited, imagine what it's like for them.

PEREIRA: I know. I know.

BERMAN: I know, but, Miles, the first two days on the surface of this comet will be the most important.

O'BRIEN: Yeah, it has an extendable rechargeable battery, which is kind of a cool thought, so we'll be able to tag along collectively, humanity that is, for quite some time, maybe into March 2015, until it gets so close to the sun that it might cook it away off and it will end up orbiting separately from the comet.

But this first two days is key because all systems are up and full and running and that's when the real science is going to occur, the data acquisition if you will.

Just going back to these scientists, watching this excitement, I always think of these guys who do this, 10, 20, 30 years on one mission. They're like that riverboat gamblers of scientists. They put all their chips on the table. It's an all-in bet.

They can spend 20, 30 years, an entire career and it can just turn out to be a smoldering hole in the ground, so a tip of the hat to them for taking the risks.

BERMAN: And they have to wait ten years to find out the other guy's cards.

PEREIRA: To that end, why don't we listen in, and listen in to some of the excitement, and listen in to what they're saying their at ESA. Let's listen.

JEAN-JACQUES DORDAIN, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY: -- and to take what the professor was telling us, this is a big step for human civilization and because this is science, scientists, knowledge, and that this is certainly terrestrial intelligence. That makes a difference.

I would like at this stage to repeat what I say after each success. The biggest problem of success is that it looks easy, and especially for us while not doing anything.

So -- and when you notice the sum of expertise, the sum of dedication, the sum of dedication, the sum of team working between 20 nationalities of member states of Europe, in cooperation with international partners, when you know that, you know that this type of success is not coming from the sky.

It comes from hard work and for expertise because the only way to reconcile risk and success is expertise. This is the reason why today we have demonstrated that the European expertise, be that ESA, be it in industry, in national space agencies, in research centers everywhere, this is the best expertise of the world because we are the first to have done that. And that will stay forever.

Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A big and certainly very emotional day for the director-general of the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain.

Ladies and gentlemen, the European Space Agency is based in Darmstadt. Darmstadt is a part of the German state of Hesse, and we have the prime minister of the state of Hesse here with us. He's also the president of the German (inaudible)

Welcome, Volker Bouffier.

VOLKER BOUFFIER, MINISTER PRESIDENT, HESSE, GERMANY: Thank you (inaudible), Professor and President Dordain. (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

PEREIRA: So we've been listening to the director-general for the European Space Agency and it's interesting -- you're pointing to something here.

BERMAN: We just got a new update from Rosetta from space on the status of the probe. It says the harpoons confirmed fired and reeled in.

PEREIRA: Amazing.

BERMAN: So that thing, according to the Rosetta, which is sending back information from 300 miles away, the probe is now attached to the comet.

PEREIRA: When you think about the fact that this thing is moving at 40,000 or more miles an hour the fact that it could even attach is an amazing feat in and of itself.

And, Tariq, I wanted to talk to you -- the managing editor of Space.com is sitting here with us here in studio. And I was thinking as we watched these -- the people from the European Space Agency losing their minds about this historic feat, this historic marvel, about what it can mean for space travel.

How big of a deal is this for the European Space Agency?

MALIK: It is -- they have reason to celebrate. It's a hard thing to do just to get into space, even harder to hit a target 300 million miles away when you want to hit it and not crash when you're doing it.

Like the -- Jean-Jacques Dordain said, this is the first time it's ever been done, and they can say that now forever. You have the confirmation of the harpoons firing, the screws drilled into the ground. They were worried that it was just a flat pancake of iron- hard ice and it just would bounce --

PEREIRA: And not grab onto anything.

MALIK: It could not grab on, it could float away, it could crash. And what we're hearing, I mean it seems like they've actually done it now -- and ten instruments on board, NASA has a couple, too, so U.S. scientists are on for the ride, too. They've been waiting for this a long time and they've got reason to be happy.

BERMAN: Alright, let's see if we hear more from Rosetta or more from Philae as they're sending signals back and waiting for the first pictures. We'll have much more on the first time ever that a man-made device has landed on a comet. History made.

PEREIRA: Try that, John Berman. You've got to catch up with a comet.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DORDAIN: This is a big step for human civilization because this is science, scientists, knowledge and that this is certainly terrestrial intelligence, that makes a difference. I would like, at this stage, to repeat what I say after each success. The biggest problem of success is that it looks easy. And especially for us while not doing anything. So when you notice sum of expertise, the sum of dedication, the sum of team-working between 20 nationalities of member states of Europe, plus cooperation with international partners, when you know that, you know that this type of success is not coming from the sky. It comes from hard work and expertise, because the only way to reconcile risk and success is --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Yay us, yay humanity.

PEREIRA: Or yay the European Space Agency. That's the Director General of the European Space Agency. There was nothing easy about the proposition that they just undertook, spending the last decade having their lander orbit with Rosetta around the solar system and then, oh, just drop on to a moving comet, a comet that was moving over 40,000 miles an hour.

We have four great people here to join us into the conversation. Our Fred Pleitgen has been watching from Germany, he's got a great model there with us. Miles O'Brien, our Space Analyst, Hakeem Oluseyi, he's a professor and a host on the Science Channel and right here in studio, Tariq Malik a Managing Editor of SPACE.com. I think this is the other aspect that we have to discuss and Miles, maybe I'll ask you about this, because I think there's so much excitement about the accomplishment, but now the big questions are, what now? What can we learn? MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Yeah, I mean it's just -- if it

failed this moment, we could declare victory and say this was an amazing accomplishment, but we want more, don't we? We pictures, we want to see what's going on. This is a fascinating glimpse at something that has intrigued humanity since the dawn of humankind.

Comets, we've looked up in the sky and seen these kind of smudgy stars and thought they were bad omens or good omens or something. And they are a fascinating connection to our ancestral past, literally billions of years ago, pulled out of the freezer and brought to us. And it this case, we are able to open the freezer door and we're going to pull out some of things there and see what's inside. What are the ingredients of all of us? Yes, and this is what we're going to find out in the next few days, we hope.

BERMAN: And Fred Pleitgen, who is in Darmstadt in Germany at mission control where they have been ecstatic for the last 25 minutes or so. Fred, we don't have pictures yet from the surface of the comet, but they have been sending back pictures since the Philae probe released from Rosetta about seven hours ago. I don't know if we have any images there, but we did get sort of a vanity image that was released by the European Space Agency. Let's put this up. This was a tweet that came out from them. You can see touchdown on 67P. I don't believe that's a real picture. Maybe it is, Fred, but you can tell they're very, very excited.

PLEITGEN: Yeah, they're absolutely excited, especially in light of the fact that so much went wrong during this mission. I think that Miles said before that these space scientists are riverboat gamblers, I think he said, and he's absolutely right. One of the scientists said to me that if you would just ask engineers to do this mission, it would have never happened, because they would have done their calculations and they would have found out it can't be done. And there are so many things that went wrong, guys. First of all, they didn't even want to go to this comet, they wanted to go to a different comet, but they missed their window to launch in time because the rocket that they were going to use blew up on launch and they had to postpone the launch.

Then, halfway into the mission as the Rosetta satellite was already en route, it ran out of power. It was in danger of running out of power, so they had to shut it down for more than two years. And then of course, they had to start it up when they believed it might be close to the comet that it needed to reach. After that, this morning they thought they had a real problem because they weren't sure whether or not the single booster that the Philae lander has, whether or not that was actually working.

So there are so many things that didn't go according to plan in the ten years that this thing was en route to this comet that right now, obviously, they're absolutely ecstatic. And John, you were just talking about those images that they sent down. When they showed us that image of the lander going towards the comet, it was taken from the Rosetta probe and it already had its landing gear and all its antennas deployed, that's when the mood here really came up. That's when people really began to lighten up because they saw that the Philae lander was working and now we can see that it's actually done its job perfectly.

The amount of calculation that went into this. I mean think about it, there are 500 million kilometers, 350 million miles away, and they've managed to touchdown with this thing and -- ooh, I don't want to ruin my model here -- they've managed to touch down on a comet that's moving at, what, 41,000 miles an hour. Just an amazing feat. And I know a lot of people here can't wait for the science to begin to see the amount of information they'll be able to extract from this comet.

PEREIRA: Yeah, Fred, so much went right, and that is to be celebrated. You bring up a good point. I want to bring in Professor Oluseyi, because I think this is an important thing to remember. All of this is done from mission control. Talk about a remote control. When I think about all of those things that had to be done, and even the fact that this mission didn't go off without a hitch, there's so many things that are now just beginning. All of these experiments, all of those instruments on board, again, they'll be operated from mission control.

OLUSEYI: This is an amazing technological feat. But luckily, we understand the laws of physics really well and we understand engineering really well, so I think this is just an illustration of how far humans have come in our technological and our scientific understanding. I've heard everybody talk a lot about oh, man, it's moving so fast.

Well, guess what? If you're moving at the same speed, it's at rest relative to you. So, you know, it is a big challenge, but we do know the laws of physics really well. We can make predictions, we can intercept small objects anywhere in the solar system, and now we're going to get back a lot of information about this comet. It's going to tell us more questions, it's going to give us more questions, and guess what? This is just a stepping tone. We're going farther, we're going beyond.

BERMAN: Professor, don't use science to diminish how cool it is to land on something moving 41,000 miles per hour. We appreciate the attempt there. No, it is incredibly cool. Gentlemen, stick around, there's a lot more to talk about. After the break, we're going to bring in astronaut Mark Kelly to get his view on this as we heard from the head of the European Space Agency, this big moment for humanity. Stay with us.

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