Matthew Soldier: The Rosetta Space Probe Matthew Soldier is working as the lead hand at the FXR Warehouse in Winnipeg. He is good at what he does: he has demonstrated to his supervisors that he is a responsible and dedicated employee who they can rely on. These traits have been recognized, too; Matthew Soldier has received two pay raises over a short four month period of time. But Matthew Soldier has some very big dreams that he is pursuing. "My goal in life is to become financially free," he says, "so I can become an astronomer or an astronaut." Astronomy and space exploration have fascinated Matthew Soldier for years. And so it was with considerable interest that he took in the news that the Rosetta Space Probe landed on a comet in early November of 2014. The Rosetta Space Probe was launched more than ten years ago and was named after the Rosetta Stone, a piece of volcanic basalt found in Egypt in 1799 that revolutionized man's understanding of the past. As Matthew Soldier knows, the primary mission of the Rosetta Space Probe is to help us in our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Solar System.
Matthew Soldier finds all of this incredibly fascinating. As he knows, astronomy is considered by many to be the study of everything, because it is the study of the universe and everything is a part of the universe. Human beings have been looking up to the stars in the nighttime sky, and wondering what it all meant, for as long as there have been human beings So when the Rosetta Space Probe successfully touched down on Comet 67P on November 12, 2014, Matthew Soldier understood that it was a really big deal. The Rosetta had already done two flyby missions of asteroids, and gone by Mars in 2007. Its ten year voyage began on March 2, 2004, and though it did not actually land on the comet until November 2014, it reached that destination the previous August and became the first spacecraft to orbit a comet. These are amazing achievements in the history of mankind and the history of space travel, Matthew Soldier believes. And it is the sort of thing that he would like to be a part of. From the time it was launched in 2004 until the time it reached the comet in 2014, some two thousand people played some role in the mission of the Rosetta. So Matthew Soldier knows that once he gets in, there is going to be an opportunity for him to take part in some fantastic voyage that, like the Rosetta, will enhance and improve our understanding of the universe, and space travel.