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Comet Probe Philae To Deploy Drill As Battery Life Wanes
An anonymous reader writes With less than a day of battery life left, The European Space Agency's Philae probe will begin to drill for samples even though the drilling may dislodge it. From the article: "Philae is sitting in the shadow of a cliff, and will not get enough sunlight to work beyond Saturday. Friday night's radio contact with the orbiting Rosetta satellite will be the last that engineers have a reasonable confidence will work. The team is still not sure where on the surface the probe came to rest after bouncing upon landing on Wednesday. Scientists have been examining radio transmissions between the orbiter and the lander to see if they can triangulate a position. This work has now produced a 'circle of uncertainty' within which Philae almost certainly lies."
Drill baby, drill!
"It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out"
Is the funniest fucking thing I've heard all day. Do you have any idea how well thought out this mission was? FFS look at the trajectory it took 10 YEARS(!) to get to the comet. And you think they overlooked the fact that the comet is craggly?
Jesus-Dunning-Kruger-Christ.
http://www.esa.int/esatv/Video...
> What state would the man be in after 10 years in space?
The "Bored" state.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
All hail the armchair asteroid mission planning experts. Why they keep hiring professionals to do these jobs is beyond me.
Philae bounced twice, the first bounce was about two hours, the second one 7 minutes. If the gravity on the comet is 1/200,000th that on earth (a reasonable estimate, it varies around the comet because it's *way* not round) then the first bounce was about 1,000 feet off the surface, but the second one was only about three feet. Seven minutes to fly up and down three feet; that's almost impossible to imagine.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I think that's pretty unfair.
It was launched 10 years ago, and has been spiraling around the solar system doing fly-bys to get going fast enough to match speed ... and then it got close enough to land, even though it wasn't perfect.
I'm more inclined to think this is a demonstration of just how damned hard something like this is, and that no matter how much you try to plan for stuff, you can't know everything until after it's happened.
I think a bunch of whiny nerds saying this was poorly thought out is some pretty lame arm chair quarterbacking.
Tell you what, when your probe lands on a comet, we'll all line up to tell you what a shitty job you've done.
Oh, wait, you don't have a probe and wouldn't know how to make one, right?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Still more capable than a useless arduino in a shoebox that cost a billion euros.
And when something doesn't go as planned, as inevitably happens at some scale, we get to listen to people complaining about the useless person stuck there that costs 100 billion euros. An the question shouldn't be if a person is more capable than a $1 billion euro robot if the person would cost way more to get there, the question should be if a person would be more capable than 100 $1 billion euro robots. For quite a lot of science work, that is a hard sell, even if a significant fraction of the robots failed, because then we could send them to many different comets and adapt and do different things with them in ways that a person couldn't even do if they were there (e.g. new instruments that require more than just duct taping together parts a person would have).
Look, unless you're a friggin' rocket scientist, or believe they had additional information they didn't use ... summarizing anything as "the whole problem" is kind of childish.
Based on your vast experience of landing on comets after a 10 year journey, do you think you have a better sense of what the assumptions about the hardness of the ice should have been? Maybe you should have shared that with them.
Lots of smart people worked on this, took all they knew and could surmise, and made choices with the best available information, and using the technology and money available to them.
I'm sure as heck not going to say "well, if only they'd done this it would have worked". I know I'm not qualified to do that, and I'm quite certain most of us on Slashdot aren't either. In fact, I'm betting the people who are qualified are all thinking this was a monumentally difficult task. NASA isn't sitting around going "Ha ha!"
To me, even what they did is some pretty mind-boggling engineering. But in interviews I heard over the last few weeks, they still knew there were risks and uncertainties.
It sucks, but unless you're more qualified than the entire team who did this, you have to realize this is still an incredible feat.
I won't even claim this to be an accurate analogy: But this is kind of like hitting a target in China from New York, using a home made gun, in the dark, and while both you and the target are moving.
Me, I'll applaud the ESA and everyone involved. Success for this kind of engineering includes all of the stuff that got you there. Getting far enough to have a failed landing is still a huge undertaking.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's why they gave it batteries that last long enough to fulfill the primary objectives of the lander.
The solar panels were for the icing on the cake. Or rather the icing on the icing of the cake - most of the scientific relevant data is collected by the orbiter.
GP is right - there's no other place where the gap between actual and imagined capabilities is so dramatic as on Slashdot. I really wonder where this overestimation of the own capabilities coupled with an uncalled-for arrogance comes from.
"It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out"
Is the funniest fucking thing I've heard all day. Do you have any idea how well thought out this mission was? FFS look at the trajectory it took 10 YEARS(!) to get to the comet. And you think they overlooked the fact that the comet is craggly?
Jesus-Dunning-Kruger-Christ.
http://www.esa.int/esatv/Video...
And Philae bounced twice, finally settling in two hours after first touching the comet, which is enough time for the comet to rotate almost 60 degrees. The two systems meant to prevent bouncing - the thruster and the harpoons - failed, so it ended up some kilometer away from the carefully chosen site. That we are getting any science at all after that potentially mission-killing news is just fantastic.
I'm hoping they make some last-ditch effort to have Philae try to jump over to another part of the comet to get more sunlight, though I'm not sure what kind of resources they have to try it. Can they command the drill and/or the legs to jab downward relatively quickly? Command the harpoons to fire? I don't know, but you can bet this will be part of the design on future missions. I actually did some work on this, which made hopping around a key part of the mission.
To be honest, the trajectory calculations aren't that difficult. It's fairly cut and dry math and there have been computer programs to calculate this stuff for decades. It's cool, don't get me wrong, and the margin for error is a lot smaller than trying to hit Jupiter, but it ain't exactly rocket science.
Wait...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out"
Is the funniest fucking thing I've heard all day. Do you have any idea how well thought out this mission was? FFS look at the trajectory it took 10 YEARS(!) to get to the comet. And you think they overlooked the fact that the comet is craggly?
Jesus-Dunning-Kruger-Christ.
http://www.esa.int/esatv/Video...
True, it's easy to throw snide comments at the people who designed this mission but until now nobody really even knew any details of what the surface of a comet looks like. Furthermore landing on Mars is difficult enough, the success rate for landings on the Martian surface is something like 30%. Getting a probe to rendezvous with a comet and land on the surface is a way bigger achievement. Finally I'm not exactly surprised that some systems failed after almost a decade in space. I just hope they manage to milk the maximum amount of data out of this probe.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It seems to me the design and/or planning of this mission were poorly thought out, it's obvious the comet has a rough surface, they knew there would be shadows.
The planning for this mission was started 30 years ago - in 1984; 5 years before the Berlin Wall came down, 7 years before the Soviet Union was dissolved, 3 years after the first IBM PC was released. This mission has been compared to "throwing a hammer from London and hitting a nail in New Delhi".
Imagine that - the IBM PC with its 16 KB of RAM was advanced, for gods' sakes! It may be that it is easy to sit in front of your top-of-the-bloody-range games PC and imagine that 'it can't be that hard', but the fact is that it would be very hard even today, and the fact that we actually have anything man-made touching the surface of an actual comet at this moment is mindblowing. It was only really designed to run a few measurements on its main battery, and even that was considered beyond what we could reasonably expect; the secondary battery and solarpanels were more of a "you never know, we might get lucky". This mission has already been a huge success.