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Philae Lands Successfully On Comet
The European Space Agency has confirmed that the Philae probe has successfully landed on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko and established contact with headquarters. The harpoons have deployed and reeled in the slack, and the landing gear has retracted. (Edit: They're now saying the harpoons didn't fire after all.) There are no photos from the surface yet, but the Rosetta probe snapped this picture of Philae after initial separation, and Philae took this picture of Rosetta. Emily Lakdawalla has a timeline of the operation (cached). She notes that there was a problem with the gas thruster mounted on top of the lander. The purpose of the thruster was to keep the lander on the comet after landing, since there was a very real possibility that it could bounce off. (The comet's local gravity is only about 10^-3 m/s^2.) The pins that were supposed to puncture the wax seal on the jet were unable to do so for reasons unknown. Still, the jet did not seem to be necessary. The official ESA Rosetta site will be continually updating as more data comes back.
Can someone explain what I'm looking at in the second picture?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
.
10 years and 317 million miles.
Harpoon did not fire. https://twitter.com/esaoperati...
It all starts at 0
How did they know the harpoons would be able to remain lodged in the target?
Rosetta solar panels at the top of the image, with the main body of the probe top right. The sun was causing lots of straylight in the image and it was quite saturated, so they had to do some major fix-up work to get anything sensible, hence the wierdness that you see on the left hand side.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Reports indicate the top jet didnt work and one guy from EAS reporting on its status say the anchors did not fire. That does not bode well.
https://twitter.com/Philae_MUP...
https://twitter.com/Philae2014
https://twitter.com/esa_rosett...
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/
mod parent up
for a government run operation.
Congrats to everyone at ESA, especially to all the people behind the scenes you never get to see but whose contribution to this project cannot be overstated.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No, the acceleration due to comet's gravity is a thousandth of a meter per second squared. The gravitational field itself is a vector quantity.
Excuse me for being a curmudgeon, but why the crap do they need half a dozen twitter accounts?
There's @esa (ok, great, your organization has a twitter account), @esa_rosetta (oh... ok, a twitter account for each mission seems redundant, but...), @Philae2014 (now hang the fuck on, you gave the LANDER a twitter account?), @esascience (as opposed to what, the esa_cooking_show?) and @esaoperations (...what was wrong with the other four accounts?!)
This is why I don't do "social media". The S/N ratio isn't just out of whack, it's non-existent. Everything is just bloody noise.
Philadelphia baseball fans wish that were true, especially if the Philly in question were Ryan Howard.
List of images....
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Hoping for some larger resolution of these. Fantastic the surface of a comet close up.
Ahh here they are...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Having checked a number of on-line news sites, the best real-time coverage seems to be on XKCD
> "The comet's local gravity is only about 10^-3 m/s^2."
But what is that in fahrenheit, you elitists!
I can only hope they named the Harpood system Queequeg...
You think the signal to noise ratio would be improved by less granularity?
Earth's gravity is roughly 10m/s^2, so the the comet's gravitational attraction is about ten thousand times weaker than ours. Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and yes, I know "ten thousand times weaker" is crappy phrasing.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Excuse me for being a curmudgeon, but why the crap do they need half a dozen twitter accounts? There's @esa (ok, great, your organization has a twitter account), @esa_rosetta (oh... ok, a twitter account for each mission seems redundant, but...), @Philae2014 (now hang the fuck on, you gave the LANDER a twitter account?), @esascience (as opposed to what, the esa_cooking_show?) and @esaoperations (...what was wrong with the other four accounts?!)
This is why I don't do "social media". The S/N ratio isn't just out of whack, it's non-existent. Everything is just bloody noise.
They probably thought they could get paid sponsorships from Red Bull, or whatever stupid shit is the motivator behind rampant eNarcissism these days.
I do. The updates are so few that splitting them between the lander and the orbiter is nuts. Similarly, a split between @esa and @esascience is nuts as well.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The S/N ratio isn't just out of whack, it's non-existent..
So are you complaining the S/N ratio is too high? Why else would you want to pile everything from a large organization into a single account other than to increase the noise? If you really wanted to get all the details about each of their missions, you could subscribe to all of their feeds, or just to a single mission if that is all you cared about, or if you wanted just the highlights, the main organization feeds. It always seems weird when people on Slashdot complain about something being modular, as if it should just all be piled together.
If it's anything like every other large organization on the planet, it's a way to circumvent the bureaucracy.
A tweet from @spaceagency probably has to go through 17 VPs of marketing. It reflects on the entire organization, and every mission the organization flies. A tweet from @spaceagencylander maybe has to go through three or four levels of marketing. It reflects only the lander's mission, and even the orbiter team doesn't really care, but they want only the things that the mission team can stand behind, so no fuel for rumormongering is going to get out, because the press is watchign that account. A tweet from @spaceagencytelemetrydude is trusted to spout all the raw data he wants, and maybe one guy sitting him to make sure he doesn't try to link to goatse. And a tweet from @somedudeinthepressgallery, zero layers, they can report whatever they can figure out while waiting for data/pictures to come in.
It's not a great system, but it's a pretty good system for getting information out in real time, when it might take a day for an @spaceagency tweet the 17 VPs of policy wankery to agree that the wording is just perfect.
Multiple accounts are useful, for example to bundle up news on certain topics only. It's no different from following only certain RSS feeds of a news site. It's good service and a way to filter the signal out of noise.
"Had his chest been a cannon, he'd have shot his Philae upon it." Or something.
That, plus if the tweets are coming straight from a team or control room, there are multiple teams involved. The lander and orbiter have separate teams located in different cities.
Your funny comment got modded up. Your stupid comment modded down. The crowd looks fine.
"Edit: They're now saying the harpoons didn't fire after all."
It's irrelevant. Even if they did fire, the electrical system would be shorted out. It can't work. It's not possible.
More here and here
In the news conference that just ended they said it appears that the craft landed, bounced, and landed again, so they are claiming not one but 2 successful landings today.
Some pictures received and will be made available, but nothing more until 14:00 UTC Thursday.
Holy crap. The EU fruitcakes here.... wow. Normally, I never react upon ACs, but your stupidity, Sir, blows my mind more than a 1 TeraVolt/meter electric field could ever do.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Well there's a couple minutes of my life I'll never get back. They appear to not even understand such simple concepts as ice != water ice.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's not as if you can't be logged into the same Twitter account from multiple locations...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
*Opens up the special bottle from 1980's*
Finally a news summary story on /. that is, exactly what is is ;) (hats off to soulskill)
Except when different pieces of news from the same freakin' lander are reported on different Twitter handles. That's when multiple accounts are counterproductive. I think that ESA's approach to PR is a bit broken.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The escape velocity is around 1 m/sec so it wouldn't take much to send the probe off again. A good jump from 67P would send you flying away (or maybe in orbit).
That distinction seems not too big of a deal, in the sense that the ice and outgassing from comets is found to largely water ice, both by spectroscopic measurements, and now by MAVEN and Rosetta. While the issues with EU shouldn't just be pinned on the behavior of a person or two, it is rather frustrating watching someone claim a type of measurement has never been made, then them being told it has been made explicitly multiple times, followed by the same person/poster repeating the original claim that such measurements have never been made but doing so in a different venue as if no one will remember or have seen the previous response (I've seen this both online, and offline, so not just random internet posters). E.g. A:"Only OH measured, never H2O," B:"But vibration modes specific to water have been observed since the 80s" A:"Oh, so water was measured, but the H came from solar wind, so there is still no water on a comet" B:"But the water and associated in hydrogen has been measured to be well in excess of solar winds." etc. followed by A going off someone else and trying again from the start, maybe hoping no one will know better in the new place...
Holy crap. The EU fruitcakes here.... wow. Normally, I never react upon ACs, but your stupidity, Sir, blows my mind more than a 1 TeraVolt/meter electric field could ever do.
I know, right? Its incidental that comet action is electrical... its just an effect. Comets are nucular... they're really just flying nucular ractors.
The Admin and the Engineer
Because that would cut down on bureaucracy... too bad you can't follow more than one account at a time.
with big boobsters!!!
I think the ESA media relations is pretty bad. There is really no explanation of what is going on now...
same with murica, most people have access to that stuff, there are a lot that dont
My cat just tweeted an angry reply to your post.
We're whalers on a comet.....now with harpooning action!
We've got a picture: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimag...
If you want space done right, go European. American missions have a higher failure rate because they use a combination of metric and imperial.. which obviously leads to unexpected results.
By now ESA has scored three successful comet landings.
With the same lander, on the same comet.
I think that's cheating,
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Actually, the split is lesser.
@esa_rosetta and @Philae2014 are popular-PR accounts for fun, relaxed reporting, supposed to chat with each other - something kids can watch.
@esaoperations is the team responsible for delivering the lander to the destination, so it's your primary source of news on the landing itself,
@esascience are the guys who operate all the scientific equipment on-board, and you'll get whatever Philae discovers from them - it's still quite a while before they have anything worthwhile to report.
@esa is organization-wide. They have quite a few more things to report than just Philae, and you will only see retweets, press notices etc from there - a secondary source.
For now, just follow @esaoperations and switch to @esascience in a couple days.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Here is the current total for the successful landing on a comet:
USA: 0
EU: 3