Professor Iwan Williams on his role in the Rosetta comet mission

The world was enraptured last month as the Rosetta mission's Philae lander made its historic landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. QMUL's Professor Iwan Williams had more reason than most to be interested, as he was one of a team of investigators working the CONSERT instrument that is part of the mission. Here he explains what CONSERT is trying to find out and how it took on a vital new function after the landing. I've been working as a co-investigator on CONSERT under the leadership of principal investigator Wlodek Kofman, who is based at the Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble, in Grenoble, France. I've been with the CONSERT project since the Rosetta mission was conceived and have been working on the science of comets since 1985. For those who don't know Rosetta is a European Space Agency mission that launched in 2004 with a mission to rendezvous with and study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It reached its target and went into orbit in August of this year, 10 years after taking off from French Guiana, and will orbit the comet for 17 months.