The 67P Project
When I was a teenager, my friend Rob Heyman and I used to geek out over a computer game built around exploring and navigating the solar system, The Halley Project. The game would give you cryptic directions, as if issuing instructions to Charlie’s cosmic angels, as to where to go. Sometimes it would be “go to the third moon of Jupiter.” Sometimes it would rely on more fine-grained space knowledge: “go to the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere.” (In which case, of course, you’d go to Titan, the large moon of Saturn.) You’d complete each round of tasks by returning to the “base” of the Halley Project, Halley’s Comet itself. Yeah, sure, land on a comet. The game was criticized by some educators and scientists for mixing its science with science fiction.
Those critics evidently couldn’t see a mere 28 years into the future. A robot launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency has now put a lander on a comet. … Read more
