Littlefinger, the conniving and vulpine Game of Thrones character who loves all the Stark women, got together with one of them two years ago to promote the European Space Agency's comet-chasing mission, Rosetta.
Aidan Gillen and Aisling Franciosi, who play Littlefinger and Lyanna Stark respectively, starred in the short film to hype the mission, which caught up to Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko in 2014 and later sent the small Philae spacecraft to make a soft landing in November of that year. The movie, titled Ambition, is all the more chilling after Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones, in which Franciosi (Lyanna Stark) plays a key role in finally revealing the true parentage of Jon Snow.
In the short film, Franciosi seems to be some kind of a Jedi padawan in a far future Earth. As part of one lesson, Gillen recalls the Rosetta mission that had occurred in the distant past, explaining that it was about more a comet rendezvous. "We also wanted to show what was possible," Gillen's character explained.
Rosetta did that with its Philae lander and revelatory images of a comet. Unfortunately, the 100kg spacecraft likely landed at an angle of about 30 degrees in the shadow of a crater wall or cliff, so it was unable to recharge its batteries with sunlight. Its batteries ran out in two days, and the European Space Agency lost regular contact with the lander, which had only begun on its primary science objectives.
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