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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.
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10 years and 317 million miles.
Harpoon did not fire. https://twitter.com/esaoperati...
It all starts at 0
The second picture was taken from the probe itself after it detached. According to the ongoing conference, the picture was taken exactly (their words) 50 seconds after the probe was released.
The Sun is the bright spot in lower middle. Rosetta itself is in the upper right. Because the probe was spinning when released, there is a slight blurring of the picture.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The blur in the center is a sunbeam -- ignore that. The boxy shape on the top right is the Rosetta probe itself. Extending to the left is Rosetta's solar panel. Here's an artist's conception of Rosetta to give you a better idea of what you're seeing. The stuff around the bottom corners and very left side of the images are just reflections/lens artifacts.
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?
https://twitter.com/Philae_MUP...
https://twitter.com/Philae2014
https://twitter.com/esa_rosett...
http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/
Is your phone over 10 years old and just traveled millions of miles through space?
No, it isn't.
This will be, what, 14-15 year old tech by now?
Do let us know when you get your iPhone to a comet and can send back pictures with it. Then we might be impressed.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Didn't realize that J.J. Abrams was involved in this project.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Don't forget bandwidth limitations. We don't have 4g connections to the lander, so downloading all those megapixels would take some time
XDInd
"Is your phone over 10 years old and just traveled millions of miles through space?"
Hasn't everything on Earth traveled "millions of miles through space" in the last 10 years?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
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
I’m on the surface but my harpoons did not fire. My team is hard at work now trying to determine why. #CometLanding
I knew they should have sent a real harpooner along on this trip. You can't just automate everything.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Ah, the "Whoosh". Because when your poor attempt at humor is indistinguishable from idiocy, clearly it's the audience's fault.
Having checked a number of on-line news sites, the best real-time coverage seems to be on XKCD
The main thing that puzzled me were what look like numbers along the body of the solar panels on Rosetta - are those computer artifacts too?
I can only hope they named the Harpood system Queequeg...
Rough crowd tonight.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How did they know the harpoons would be able to remain lodged in the target?
That is easy: They didn't.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist, and yes, I know "ten thousand times weaker" is crappy phrasing.
So ... don't phrase it that way? What the hell is wrong with "one ten-thousandth as strong," anyway?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Bad form, calling "whoosh" on a response your own attempt at a joke. Only a third party can call "whoosh".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not only the simple age of the devices, but modern space electronics are made using exotic SOI processes (Early era devices had features so large that radiation-induced avalanches from single particle didn't matter, but then Moore's Law happened and an insulator substrate became necessary) and in terms of feature size and speed run far, far behind the state of the art commercial devices at the time of design
Last I checked, the most powerful general purpose spaceflight-rated computer is still a rad-hard MIPS R3000 running around 300MHz with 128MB of memory. It cost a quarter million dollars, but it's also multiple redundant everything and it wouldn't even fart at a radiation dose sufficient to kill a thousand people.
Look at the specs on New Horizons: One megapixel camera. 16GB onboard SSD... And after fifteen years cruising through space colder than a cryogenic refrigerator it wakes up and tells mission command "Ready for Pluto to come at me, bros!". Fuck yeah, science.
Whew! What a relief! I'm not a pilot, but that looks like a bad angle to be approaching a runway, especially at night.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So, the weight of this 100 kg lander would be about 1 newton, or the equivalent of 100 grams on Earth. That's a little more than 2 golf balls. It's a wonder they can land that without it bouncing off.
Actually, 0.1 newton, or 10 grams - the weight of 2 nickels.
Not really - only inertial reference frames qualify for that feature. Circular motion (actually any acceleration) is absolute, easily measured, and disqualifies you as an equal member in the association of arbitrary reference frames.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.