ANDREA ACCOMAZZO: 彗星追逐者
前飞行测试员驾驶驾驶Rosetta冰冷的太空世界。
作者：Elizabeth Gibney
Andreas Reeg/Agentur Focus/Eyevine
Nearly two decades ago, Andrea Accomazzo got into trouble with his girlfriend when she found a scrap of paper on his desk. In his handwriting was scrawled a phone number next to a female name: Rosetta.
大概二十年前，Andrea Accomazzo跟他的女朋友发生了点问题，因为他的女朋友在他的手稿里面发现一个女性的名字：Rosetta。
“She thought it was a girl,” says Accomazzo. “I had to explain to my jealous Italian girlfriend that Rosetta is an interplanetary mission that is flying to a comet in almost 20 years.”
Accomazzo说她的女朋友认为这是一个女性的名字，我不得不想我那吃醋的女朋友表示那是一个正在飞向彗星的星际航行飞行器。
Ever since, Accomazzo has divided his attention. He eventually married his girlfriend and has also spent the past 18 years pursuing the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. As flight director for the mission, Accomazzo led the team that steered Rosetta to its August
rendezvous with the comet, following a 6.4-billion-kilometre journey from Earth. The pinnacle of the project came in November, when Rosetta successfully set down a lander named Philae, providing scientists with the first data from the surface of a comet and
making it one of the most successful missions in the history of the European Space Agency (ESA).
没当这个时候，Accomazzo不得不分散他的注意力，但是最后他还是和他的女朋友结婚了，在他们结婚那年，他已经话了十八年的时间去追逐一颗名字67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko彗星。作为这个任务的主管，Accomazzo领导着一个团队操作Rosetta号在八月份成功和彗星相遇，此时离地球有64亿公里。这个任务的关键时间是在今年的11月份，Rosetta成功释放了菲莱登陆器，第一时间给科学家传回了彗星的表面数据，这是欧洲航天局历史上最成功的项目之一。
Accomazzo did not act alone: it took a large operations team at ESA to manoeuvre Rosetta with enough precision to drop Philae down just 120 metres from the centre of the landing zone. “Given that we‘d had a 500-metre error circle, that was not a bad shot,”
says Fred Jansen, who led the mission. When Philae‘s anchoring systems failed, the craft bounced into a shady site where it could not charge its solar panels, so the lander lost power after 64 hours. But in that time, it gathered a trove of data that will
add to the information collected by Rosetta about the comet‘s structure and composition. Armed with those insights, scientists hope to better understand the origin and evolution of the Solar System, including whether comets could have brought water and organic
molecules to Earth during its infancy。
Accomazzo并不孤独，他和他庞大的团队一起小心翼翼十分精密的控制着Rosetta释放菲莱120米高的地方降落到地面。这个项目的领导者Fred Jansen说尽管那个时候我们已经有500米的误差，但是降落得还算不错。由于菲莱地表的原因，地表抓固装置失效，飞行器在落到地面后弹起来弹到了一块阴影区域使得没有足够的阳光给它的太阳能电板充电，所以飞行器在64小时后因电力耗尽失效了，但那个时候，飞行器已经向地球传回了很多彗星结构和成分的数据。通过这个数据，使得科学家能够更好理解太阳系的诞生和演化，包括彗星在初期是否携带水和有机分子到地球。
Accomazzo started off his career focused on a different type of flight. He first trained as a test pilot in the Italian Air Force. But although he loved flying, he found the culture too constraining and after two years he quit to study aerospace engineering.
With his quiet, hard-working, sometimes no-nonsense nature, colleagues say that Accomazzo brings a bit of the military with him into mission control.
Accomazzo起初的职业是个飞行员，服务于意大利空军。尽管他热爱飞行，但是军队限制太大于是两年后他开始学习太空发动机的知识。在他安静努力甚至苛刻的工作下，他开始带领一些军人和他一起开始了这个项目的控制任务。
For Accomazzo, the biggest parallel between flying a fighter jet and Rosetta is the need for split-second judgements. “You have to prepare and train a lot to be able to make the right decision, very quickly,” he says. Between launch and landing, his team ran
87 full-day simulations.
对于Accomazzo来说，飞行和控制Rosetta最大的共同点就是都需要很快的应急反应能力。他说，你必须经过大量的准备和锻炼才有能力在关键的时候做出迅速的决策。对于发射和登陆项目，他和团队已经进行了87天全天候的模拟。
Although the Rosetta mission has been a broad success, Accomazzo still cried when he heard that Philae had died, and hopes the lander will revive when the comet approaches the Sun. After swinging around the Sun in August 2015, the comet will head back out towards
deep space.
尽管Rosetta的使命已经成功了，但当他听到菲莱死亡的消息之后还是哭了，他希望登陆器能够复活当彗星接近太阳的时候，到了2015年8月份的时候，登陆器将会朝向太阳被阳光照射到。
By early 2017, there will be too little sunlight to power Rosetta, and Accomazzo is planning a daring finale. He would love to see the craft skim above the surface of the rubber-duck-shaped comet through the valley that separates its body and head. The team
might even try to land the spacecraft on the comet‘s surface.
到了2017年初，照射到Rosetta的阳光会变少，Accomazzo考虑那个时候退役。他喜欢看到从返回的彗星表面高低不平的表面和错乱的山谷的图片。他的团队甚至考虑过把整个飞信息降落到彗星的表面。
The decision might not be up to him. Accomazzo is stepping away from the day-to-day flight operations at Rosetta and is busy preparing for ESA‘s interplanetary missions to Mercury, Mars and Jupiter. Even with such exciting projects, he finds it hard to leave
Rosetta behind. “It‘s a bit sad,” he says. “I don‘t know how I will be able to cope.”
这个决定可能由不得他了，Accomazzo已经不做操控工作了，并已经开始在为欧洲航天局登陆Mercury, Mars and Jupiter的计划做准备。经历了这个令人激动的项目，他很难把Rosetta抛之脑后。他说有点难过不知道如何安慰自己。
He still dreams of Rosetta. “This morning I woke up at 4 a.m. and thought ‘something is wrong‘,” he says. “At 7.30 a.m. I got a call — Rosetta had briefly lost signal to Earth at 4 a.m. — I often have this kind of episode. I‘m totally linked.”
他仍然在想象着Rosetta，他说：今天凌晨四点我醒来，觉得哪里有什么不对，早上七点，我接到了个电话，他们说Rosetta在今天早上四点和地球失去了联系，我经常有这种错觉，我已经完全陷进去了。
