Wishing on a comet

Unless you've been on a comet yourself over the last few days, you can't have failed to notice that the European Space Agency has landed a robotic probe on a comet some 300 million miles away from the Earth. This is pretty special for me because, in my day job, I work in the department where the British team who built the Ptolemy instrument (the one designed to analyse what the comet is made of in a bid to see if the commentary water is the same as that on earth) are based and it was amazing and brilliant to see them celebrating what, for some, has been 20+ years work with a successful landing. The best analogy for their attempt that I saw yesterday was that it was like 'launching a hammer from London to hit a nail in Delhi', although 'trying to land a fly on a bullet' was pretty good too.

You cannot fail to have been moved by Professor Monica Grady's overjoyed reaction when she hugged BBC's David Shukman (currently here if you haven't seen it http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30022765). This is true passion and dedication again – I seem to have been surrounded by a lot of it lately! It takes all that and more to get a space mission off the ground [pun intended :) ] and it takes an extraordinary amount of patience. Rosetta was initially due to be launched on the second Ariane rocket back in 2002 but when the first one exploded on the launch pad, it took two further years to ensure the second rocket wouldn't suffer the same fate before Rosetta could even leave the Earth.

Yesterday was truly inspiring and a huge achievement for mankind - the resultant leap forward in our technological prowess from this mission has been translated into areas such as healthcare and water quality. Our individual dreams might be smaller in scope but they may feel just as impossible sometimes. What's important is that for each knock back we get up and try again, from each setback we learn and hone our talent because then success has to be practically guaranteed.