Giotto’s brief encounter, Twenty years ago Options

[Rakhir]

Giotto’s brief encounter
http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMSZ0NVGJE_index_0.html

Twenty years ago, in the night between 13 and 14 March 1986, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft encountered Comet Halley.

[Stu]

Ah yes, Giotto encounter night, I remember it well, and still get a slightly queasy feeling when I do. I was a youngling then, and as an avid and obsessed-with-space-since-I-was-THIS-high Halley's Comet was a massive, massive deal for me, and I'd been watching it brighten and grow through my 3" scope, from a tiny fuzzball to a slightly bigger fuzzball, and was almost wetting mjyself with excitement on "Giotto Night". I told my family that we absolutely HAD to watch the live TV coverage, and they indulged me and went along with it. So, there we were, all watching the TV, waiting for the images to come in, listening to the "experts" in the studio getting more and more excited as the clock ticked down to closest approach... looking forward to seeing the solid nucleus, the tail, all in close-up... When the actual images came down, and they were just that migraine-inducing splash of colour that looked like someone had spilled paint on the TV screen, and no-one in the studio seemed to know either if the encounter had gone as planned or what the hell they were looking at on the pictures, four sets of eyes turned to me accusingly in a "You made us sit here and wait for this..?" kind of way...

It didn't matter how hard I wished, the ground didn't open up and swallow me.

Of course, I now know that that image was an amazing achiement, and that I'd be very impressed by it if I saw it here on UMSF now, but at the time it was a crushing, crushing disappointment, and I remember thinking how much I preferred the honest view through my own trusty telescope.

I've often wondered how differently things would have turned out if Giotto's images had been more photographic. Would more people here in the UK, and across Europe, have been inspired by space exploration? But, on the other hand, it was covered live on TV, with images shown almost in realtime. That didn't happen with ROSETTA's encounters with Mars or Earth.

Makes you think, doesn't it?