Public lecture: The European Space Agency's Rosetta Mission to Comet 67P

Warwick Holmes, UNSW Alumnus and Former ESA Rosetta Team Member, speaks about the first interplanetary space exploration mission to successfully orbit and land a scientific probe on the surface of a comet more than 500 million km from Earth. 

For the last 29 years Warwick has been working in Europe exclusively on the development of European Space Agency spacecraft including: Scientific, Earth Observation, Telecommunications, Navigation and Manned spacecraft programs. He is an Avionics System Engineer specializing in the integration and testing of spacecraft hardware and software and project management. He was an ESA staff member that worked on the Rosetta program for 5 years during the building, testing and launch phases of this mission.

Warwick has performed five launch campaigns at the ESA launch base in French Guiana, South America, with the Ariane-3, Ariane-4, Ariane-5 and Soyuz-STB launch vehicles. He was designated as the "Spacecraft Support Team leader" (SST) responsible for giving the final "Go-for-Launch" call from French Guiana to the Flight Operations Director in ESOC Germany to start the final automatic launch countdown sequence of the Rosetta Mission on 2nd March 2004.

The Rosetta spacecraft has been in interplanetary flight through the solar system for more than 11 years traveling a total distance of 7 billion kilometres, four times around the Sun to reach Comet-67P. Rosetta has achieved several "firsts" in space exploration history being the first spacecraft to orbit and land a science probe directly onto the surface of a comet.