Lessons in innovation: the Rosetta mission and the long game

January was a busy month for my adopted home country, Switzerland. Not only did the great and the good of corporate and political life – plus some celebrities – turn up for the World Economic Forum’s annual get-together in Davos, but Switzerland also topped the Global Innovation Index for the second year running, and was named the third most inclusive advanced economy in the world.

I really enjoy living in Switzerland. For me it has some of the best things about northern Europe: plenty of mountains and snow for skiing; wonderful scenery; crystal clear waters; and excellent watches. I like the fact that it has a healthy attitude towards diversity (where else would you get four different national languages and so many religions packed into such a small area?). It’s also of course the home of CERN, which houses the Large Hadron Collider, and was the birthplace of the World Wide Web in the 1980s.

However, one of the very best things – well, people – in Switzerland has to be Dr Kathrin Altwegg, who is a Professor at the University of Bern. She was a Principal Investigator for the Rosetta mission, during which scientists built, launched and then landed a spacecraft on a comet. Her role was managing the analysis of the gases and chemicals found on the comet and in its atmosphere, to see what they could tell us about the origins of the solar system and the beginnings of life on Earth.

I’ve watched a couple of Dr Altwegg’s speeches, which, besides being pretty humorous, really bring home how audacious the Rosetta program was. She speaks Swiss German, so for those who don’t know the language, the European Space Agency website has all the information about the mission, including some great little cartoons that followed the journey. (Be warned, if you are in any way emotional you might want to have a handkerchief ready when watching these.)

I loved following the news about Rosetta, which is now in my list of top innovations. I mean, just how do you build, launch and then land a craft on a comet’s nucleus – a lump of rock, dust and gas that is millions of miles away, travelling at 135,000 kilometres per hour and just four kilometres in diameter? If ever something could be called a “moving target”, this is it.

As it turns out, the answer is that you play the long game, meticulously planning, analysing and adjusting in minute detail at each step along the way.

This is something that I think got a bit lost in all of the excitement when Rosetta crash-landed on Comet 67P last September. As Dr Altwegg explains, the preparations began years before that, as scientists examined the results from previous missions, including the craft Giotto’s rendezvous with Halley’s Comet in 1986.

Not only did the Rosetta team have to build a craft capable of taking a ten-year trek into deep space – more than five times Earth’s distance from the Sun – they had to figure out how to use the gravitational pull of both Earth and Mars to help steer its course. They designed Rosetta to be powered by solar energy, so it fell into hibernation when it strayed too far from the warmth of the Sun’s rays. They equipped both Rosetta and the lander craft Philae with a phenomenal array of experiments to carry out and share. And they had to act quickly when things went wrong, for example when the mission’s first rocket failed in 2003, and when Philae didn’t land where it was expected to on the comet, falling out of communication.

All things considered, it seems almost impossible that the mission succeeded. But it did, and it achieved many firsts along the way:

• The first spacecraft to: orbit a comet’s nucleus; fly alongside a comet as it headed towards the inner solar system; examine from close proximity how a frozen comet is transformed by the warmth of the Sun; and fly close to Jupiter’s orbit using solar cells as its main power source
• The first controlled touchdown on a comet's nucleus
• The first images from a comet’s surface and the first in situ analysis of its composition

Pretty impressive!

From take-off through to the final crash-landing, the journey took more than twelve years. I can’t even begin to imagine the millions upon millions of precise calculations, recalculations, experiments and manoeuvres that, combined, made it happen.

This is a lesson that I think many of us can learn from. As the pace of technological change grows ever faster, one risk we face is that the notion of “innovation” becomes devalued; merely a short code for the latest new thing, with a short shelf life and an even shorter legacy.

As the Rosetta mission showed us, true innovations are different. Sometimes, solving the impossible problems – like landing a 1.0 x 1.0 x 0.8 metre “Swiss Army knife” spacecraft on a tiny comet millions of miles away – makes it worth playing the long game.

Here’s to Dr Altwegg and all of the Rosetta team.

Photo credit: European Space Agency