Star pupil zooms in to say thanks

Warwick Holmes (left) with his former tutor Professor Jonathan Scott. Photo / Christine Cornege

It was the black-and-white, flickering image of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon more than 45 years ago that inspired 8-year-old Warwick Holmes to create his own piece of space exploration history.

Mr Holmes, now 53, is an avionics systems engineer and has been working on European Space Agency (ESA) programmes for the past 29 years.

The Sydney-born electrical engineer is best known for his role in building, testing and launching the ESA's space craft Rosetta, which last year created a world first by successfully orbiting and landing a probe on Comet-67P.

Yesterday, he was in Hamilton to thank his old university lecturer Professor Jonathan Scott, who now heads Waikato University's electrical engineering department.

Professor Scott taught Mr Holmes at the University of Sydney in the early 1980s.

"I was very lucky. Apart from my own personal interest, I had extremely good teachers and one of those teachers was Professor Jonathan Scott ... He made by far the greatest impact on my education at university."

Rosetta's mission astonished scientists and space geeks around the world - including Mr Holmes.

"We were surprised to be able to get out there. It took such an enormous human effort in engineering and intelligence and science to make a spacecraft that could survive in space for so long - more than 10 years and 6.5 billion kilometres - to catch this comet so far out on the edges of the solar system.

"It's extremely dark, it's extremely small, and it's very, very far away, so [different] in every comparison possible. The size of the comet is only 4km by 3km by 2km."

The entire mission, from the first meeting to landing, was a 25-year odyssey, Mr Holmes said, which cost $ 2 billion.

Rosetta looped around the solar system four times to catch the comet.

Warwick Holmes will give a free public lecture at Waikato University's Academy of Performing Arts on Thursday at 6pm.