We’ve been telling you all along that the Rosetta mission is incredible—the spacecraft has traveled for 10 years and some 250 million miles, and on November 12, it’ll become the first spacecraft ever to land on a comet. Now it appears that Aidan Gillen, the guy who plays ‘Littlefinger’ on HBO’s Game of Thrones, is also getting behind the mission. In a sci-fi short named Ambition, Gillen's character explains why Rosetta is awesome.
For a long time, the origins of water and indeed life on our home planet remained an absolute mystery. So we began searching for answers beyond Earth. Where could all this water have come from? In time we turned to comets -- one trillion celestial balls of ice, dust, complex molecules left over from the birth of our solar system…
The flick, which was a collaboration between Platige Image and the European Space Agency, is mostly about overcoming failure. That’s because the Rosetta mission was originally intended to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket in 2003, to rendezvous with a comet named 46P/Wirtanen in 2011. Then, in 2002, an Ariane 5 rocket exploded while launching a communications satellite, putting the Rosetta mission in jeopardy. Undaunted, the mission launched in 2004 instead on another Ariane 5 rocket, with a new comet in its crosshairs.
“Ambition, stubbornness, nothing has changed,” says Gillen’s character in Ambition. “We fall. We pick ourselves up again, and we adapt.”
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