Skibbereen sees moon jump over the cows

For a few moments yesterday, a little part of West Cork was transported to the cosmos.

As National Digital Week got underway in Skibbereen, a room crammed with secondary school students did something many might wrongly assume is beyond them — they adored science.

Then again, the science in question was that which allowed a space probe to land on a comet hurtling through space, with an Irishman at the controls.

That man is Laurence O’Rourke from Mullingar, Co Westmeath, a graduate of University College Cork’s Tyndall Institute and someone with a story to tell.

As science operations controller on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, he helped to oversee in August last year the probe’s arrival at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — the first ever rendezvous with a comet.

There were loud and unmistakeable whoahs when Laurence illustrated the comet’s size in a picture which superimposed it on a photo of Los Angeles.

“Hollywood is crushed,” he added for effect.

Rosetta travelled for just over 10 years before reaching the comet, then releasing a lander called Philae to its surface.

The science is mind boggling: How, on release, the lander was moving at 55,000km/h but was down to 1m per second by the time it reached the surface, or how it travelled along the surface for two hours.

Students from various schools listened to the sound of the comet — radio waves that replicate a demented woodpecker — and heard how a comet smells: A mixture of rotten eggs, horse manure, vinegar and other stinky stuff.

The mission has detected 16 organic molecules including four that were previously unknown, while Philae, thought to be lost or completely broken, was found again earlier this year.

The mission continues and Rosetta itself will later next year finally descend to the surface of the comet as its power finally runs out, hundreds of millions of kilometres out in space.

Laurence’s presentation was part of the education talks organised for day one of the event and, in a parallel session, experts from Herdwatch, Teagasc and elsewhere discussed Farming 2030, the agriculture of the future.

That session was also packed out, with speakers such as Conor Beirne, senior vet at Dairy Master, explained how already technology is available to inform farmers when an individual cow is feeling sick, or lame, or even if they’re chewing the cud or not. Fascinating stuff, but the competition was fierce.

Laurence outlined a future ESA mission launching in 2020 that will observe a moon linked to two asteroids, which will then pull back to observe another vessel, launched by Nasa, hammer into the same moon to investigate the effects of “asteroid deflections”.

The cows have a lot of work to do to be keeping up with that.