James Hough - "Comets [the Rosetta Mission] and Asteroids"

A talk given by James Hough to Herefordshire Astronomical Society on the 7th March 2024. James led the astronomy research programme at the University of Hertfordshire for almost 40 years, retiring as Director of the Centre for Astrophysics in 2010. ESA's Rosetta mission was the first to rendezvous with a comet, the first to follow a comet on its orbit around the Sun, and the first to deploy a lander to a comet's surface. Who can forget the excitement of following Philae's "soft" landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko? James tells us about comets, asteroids and the story of Rosetta's 10 year journey.