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Philae's Batteries Have Drained; Comet Lander Sleeps
astroengine (1577233) writes "In the final hours, Philae's science team hurried to squeeze as much science out of the small lander as possible. But the deep sleep was inevitable, Rosetta's lander has slipped into hibernation after running its batteries dry. This may be the end of Philae's short and trailblazing mission on the surface of Comet 67P, but a huge amount of data — including data from a drilling operation that, apparently, was carried out despite concerns that Philae wasn't positioned correctly — was streamed to Rosetta mission control. "Prior to falling silent, the lander was able to transmit all science data gathered during the First Science Sequence," said Stephan Ulamec, Philae Lander Manager. "This machine performed magnificently under tough conditions, and we can be fully proud of the incredible scientific success Philae has delivered.""
3D printing and private space means that we'll soon have dozens, no, hundreds of private space probes out there searching for mineable asteroids and comets because there's just so much money to be made out there!
I think we're all more interested in the shirt drama than any of this science stuff!
While the main battery is nearly depleted and at this point there is not enough solar power striking the solar panels to boot it back up, as the comet approaches the sun the light intensity should go up. We can hope that the existing conditions provide enough power to prevent damage to the landers electronics. Then as the comet approaches the sun and the comet either changes origination to provide more light or just Philae get more intense light it may rise again. That would be grand!
So did they collect the data that tests for chiral amino acids? I assume that would be the mass spec?
No one gives a damn about it, the SJW crowd have informed us all we need to be FAR more focused on the shirt of one the crew for the lander. It's of dire importance we raise awareness about this mans shirt.......
What does a robot lander dream of, I wonder?
@esaoperations Lander now performing 'lift & turn' of the main body on the landing gear - will last about 10 mins. telecomm link is good #CometLanding
@esaoperations The @Philae2014 Lander has switched to stand by due to low power. All instruments off. Comm link still active #cometlanding
Because the scientists wear shirts featuring pin-up girls!"
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
The dark gray comet
The Philae sleeps tonight
woo-oo-OO-oo..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It is amazing how ESA continues to have spectacular failures project after project. They manage to reach the target just to fail miserably due to lack of testing or by ignoring basic configurations.
Remember the Mar's Beagle?? The probe made it to Mar's, just to have a spectacular crash. Turns out ESA failed to test the entry system (parachute, airbags and backshell)
Remember the Cassini–Huygens mission?? The spacecraft and probe combo managed to survive the flight to Saturn's moon Titan, some moron at ESA decided that it was a good idea to run a reconfiguration test (without verifying on the soft-simulator) at the last minute and completely disabled one of the dual-channel communication system that the Huygens needed to send the collected data. The result, a successful (and scheduled) crash landing on Titan and garbage data because a little less than 50% of the data packets were sent out by the probe.
Only if comets are balls of ice, like we used to think. Shooting off monster blasts of vaporized rock needs a lot more heat, so there's probably a chance to charge up the batteries before then :)
Fifty-six hours after landing on the surface of a comet, Philae sent one more round of data about its new home across 310 million miles of space. Then, its power went out.
"@Rosetta, I'm feeling a bit tired, did you get all my data? I might take a nap..." read a message on the @philae2014 Twitter feed.
The Rosetta mission's twitter response: "You've done a great job Philae, something no spacecraft has ever done before."
All the experiments on board the lander had a chance to run and return information back to Earth. Philae's instruments scooped up material from the comet's surface, took its temperature, sent radio waves through its nucleus, and went hunting for hints of organic material. Cameras took the first panoramic images from the surface of a comet.
It has been a whirlwind ride for the lander, which was dropped onto the surface of the mountain-sized comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday morning. Two harpoons that were designed to tether it to the surface failed to fire, and scientists say the lander made two bounces before becoming stable. The first bounce caused the lander to go one-third of a mile into the air.
Friday morning, ESA officials expressed concern that the lander would not have enough battery power left to send back any more data from experiments it was conducting on its new, icy home.
When Philae landed on the comet on Wednesday, it had enough battery power for about 60 hours of work. Scientists initially hoped that it would continue to operate on solar power, but the lander seemed to have settled in a hole on the comet, where it was surrounded by rock-like structures that block the sun.
Stefan Ulamec, the lander manager from DLR, said the that one of the solar panels on the lander was getting about an hour and 20 minutes of sunlight a day. Two other panels got just 20 to 30 minutes a day, he said.
At a news conference Friday morning before the last signal was received, Ulamec said it was possible that scientists would not hear from the lander again.
"We are hoping to get contact again this evening, but it is not secured," he said. "Maybe the battery will be empty before it talks to us."
Happily, that turned out not to be the case. On Friday evening, ESA reported that all the science experiments had been deployed, and that the lander had been rotated 35 degrees in an attempt to get more sun on one of its larger solar panels.
There is a chance that as the comet flies closer to the sun, the increase in solar energy will allow ESA to communicate with Philae once again.
ESA officials say the odds of that happening are small, but with Philae, the little lander that could, anything is possible.
When you stop and think about the fact that the Rosetta project was launched over ten years ago (something I didn't realize until recently), it's hard not to feel sorry for the scientists and others on the project.
The statements the ESA is putting out have a positive spin on them (for multiple reasons, I'm sure), but at the end of the day this has got to be a pretty hard blow to the people personally invested in the project. After the effort required just to get it launched and a decade of waiting, it must be hard on them. Wish them the best of luck for a second chance when the comet nears the Sun.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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When I read the title of this story, a song popped into my head...
"On the comet, the speeding comet, the lander sleeps tonight...."
After all the trouble and expense of sending a probe or lander out into the unknown, it seems a waste not to provide them with an RTG for reliable power. Solar panels have hobbled Mars rovers as well as other spacecraft.
what you say is true, but i think your attitude is a bit off...
sure those are failures, but ESA has alot of catching up to do...how many ESA astronauts have been killed on the launch pad?
how many ESA shuttles have be lost?
ESA should celebrate success wherever they find it...
no excuses of course...they should just...do better next time!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Nuclear batteries would keep that sucker alive for decades.
One last hippie dance? Und wir tanzen!
For he's a jolly good fellow,
For he's a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us
And so say all of us, and so say all of us
For he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good
For he's a jolly good fellow, and so say all of us!
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thanks you
I had to google "shirtstorm" to see what you're talking about... holy shit there is no hope left for society.
Business Insider posted compare-and-contrast photographs of the live-streaming Matt Taylor in his lingerie tee-shirt and tattoos and his female counterparts in the control room for India's Mars landing.
The only thing needed to complete the picture was Google Glass.
Rosetta Scientist Pisses Off Twitter With A Shirt Covered In Half-Naked Women
It's quite clear in this video that Taylor knows he screwed up badly here. Rosetta mission scientist Dr. Matt Taylor cries during apology over 'offensive' shirt
is there a heaven for landers?
Everything from Crapple has been bad lately. I blame Tim Cook.
On the other hand, in India you get raped on a bus ride.
Earth will get a ticket for dumping.
Deep in space, in quiet space...the lander sleeps tonight...
Still hugely impressive, and it might still wake up eventually.
Thats a huge load of shit honestly.
No basic configurations were ignored because there are no basic configurations for landing on something you have no idea what it looks and what its made of and noone has done before. The Philae lander was a small high risk/high reward longshot compared to Rosetta which -remember is the main mission). A year ago you could hear mission engineers saying the probabilty of even landing succesfully was 50-50.
Mars is hard and parachutes are notoriously unreliable and wierd. Lots and lots of robots have crashed on mars and some didnt even go that far. Thats exactly why it was such a big deal the indians got to orbit on the first try.
Honestly the things you mention on the Cassini mission Ive never heard of, and i work for the damn project. Huygens had a nice soft landing and even got a nice picture on the surface. It had a 3 hour battery and no solar panels so obviously it died after that. It was a huge sucess by any fucking standard.
Also Cassini is mostly a NASA mission.
The only valid criticism of ESA is that they are not as good as NASA at communicating and PR but thats mostly cultural (i.e. they dont really care)
On the other hand, in India you get raped on a bus ride.
If you're lucky.
No tears it's with Spirit and the Vikings now.
What you really want is a Nuclear Verne Gun.
Launch 3500 tonnes at escape velocity in a single shot. Enough to kickstart a lunar colony. All for roughly the same cost as a single 20 tonne-to-LEO conventional rocket launch.
Drill a 2-3km shaft into a salt dome, excavate a cavity at the bottom, suspend a 150kT nuclear warhead at the centre surrounded by a reaction mass, such as water laced with a neutron absorber. Above the cavity, at the bottom of the shaft, put a large shock absorber (such as a few hundred metres of oil backed by an ablative-coated pusher plate), with your 3500 tonnes of payload on top.
Most of the radiation would be contained underground, and a dome over the launch site would capture most of the rest.
If you want to launch into LEO, you can have a much larger payload, over 10,000 tonnes, but you'll need a conventionally rocket as a "chase ship" to grab it and circularise the orbit. Likewise you'll need an insertion and landing burns for a lunar payload, however you can use Orion-type nuclear propulsion once you're past the Van Allen belts. Launch your delicate payloads (like people) via more conventional means.
This would be an ideal way for China to leap decades ahead of every other space power in just one or two (somewhat controversial) Verne launches. 3500 tonnes would be enough payload for not only a lunar base, but enough fuel stockpiled in lunar orbit to power a LEO-LLO ferry for the conventionally launched humans (and delicate payloads.) Pretty much as soon as they have their proposed space station built, they have enough technology and capacity to take advantage of the Verne payload.
Note: 150kT keeps you under the cut-off for the nuclear test ban treaty. However, in an emergency (say, asteroid threat) a 20MT warhead would be able to launch over 200,000 tonnes (almost two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.)
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
This is the second time that a multi-million dollar space project fails spectacularly for the reliance on Solar Panels.
Sounds better/funnier if you imagine it read to you by Scott Manley. Too bad batteries are not recharging, but I bet ESA still managed to unlock som new goodies in their tech tree with all the science they got.
Where are the photos? We seen first ones but then what...? Even tonight there was info that philae is sending new awesome photos.... but have you seen them? I can't find them anywhere... so what exactly happened?
Reading the pre mission discussions, they already knew that the geography of their target was going to be challenging, so I'm curious why they went with solar power (that requires some pretty consistent orientation data) instead of rtg's for Philae? It was further clear that once the comet started outgassing nobody has any clue how that thing is going is going to spin our tumble, an even better reason for rtgs.
Anyone know?
-Styopa
Poorly planned and implemented, all that way, all that time, all that cost for this.
Way to drop the ball ESA.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Why does NASA's use of the term "science data" sound so weird to me? I mean, sure, it's data collected for scientific purposes, but the turn of phrase just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it sounds pretentious.
If people were not so afraid of radionuclides Philae would be awake.... for years.
Note to SCIENCE ENGINEERING GENIUSES, when running a 100 million first of it's kind science project that depends on sunlight to run batteries. DON'T PARK IN THE SHADOWS!!!! It ain,t rocket science, ya know?
A billion dollars down the toilet and what did we get? Some .useless data.
I had been wondering if someone was quietly pranking us all with the name Philae Lander. Then I see the Shirtstorm meme and the stars align.
Is there a Mr. Ander in the room? A Mr. Phil Ander?
Yet another expensive failure by rich kids exploring space from their fancy offices, all funded by the working poor ... go science!
"It" sure does! Barb's /.'s own resident "TraNsTeStiCuLar MoNsTrOsiTy"
You're a radically abnormal "TraNsTeStiCuLar MoNsTrOsiTy" (R O T F L M A O)
You "TraNsTeStiCuLar MoNsTrOsiTy" (R O T F L M A O)
The end of mission for the orbiter is 2015, which is independent of the lander that was not expected to last anywhere near that long, even if it went long like the Mars rovers did.
Neil Armstrong flying over a boulder strewn crater and finding a suitable landing site on the fly vs. Philae happily flying into a hole.
Which one is lucky? The one who contracts a heretofore unknown disease or the one that gets to call in sick to the call center?
A. neither. Obama hasn't got obamacare past Indias parliment. Although outsourcing Pelosi to India might do it.
I was sorely disappointed that more thought hadn't gone into the Power Supply for this adventurous comet lander and catching it outward bound from our sun would have given us more insight to where this comet comes from as well as images. But still, its better than anything I've done lately by about 314 1/2 Million miles!
I was manager at Boeing on a Gun-Launch propellant delivery system study, and using them for space launch is quite feasible. They have been used in hypersonic research for decades, like this one at Arnold Engineering Development Center: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... You just need to make one somewhat larger, and install it on a mountain with the right slope.
Gas guns are preferred over electromagnetic ones for low launch rates. The power supply for a space launch gun would be immense, because the power draw is very high for a short time. High pressure gas can be stored in a tank, and released all at once. Electromagnetic would be more efficient in the long run, but you need to overcome the high initial cost.
For humans and spacecraft equipment (as opposed to bulk items like fuel and structural parts), you are limited to about 6 g's (60 m/s^2). There are a few locations on Earth where you can install a 20 km pipe, which lets you reach about Mach 5. The gas pressure for that level of acceleration is surprisingly low, about what is put in vehicle tires.
"Prior to falling silent, the lander was able to transmit all science data gathered during the First Science Sequence..."
Here it is:
100 100 100 1
Next time land in the sun. Is that too hard?
> The only thing of value in space: water.
You have a very limited view of what is valuable. The amount of solar energy passing the Earth, closer than the Moon's orbit, is equal to the whole world's known fossil fuel reserves every minute. Tapping even a tiny fraction of that could power our entire civilization. What's that worth?
You have a very limited understanding of what is actually possible with real technology. And if you thought the climate change was bad NOW, imagine pumping in even more energy!
Thank deity that none of you children are in charge of anything more complex than the soft drink fountain at the 7/11.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
Ain't ever. EVER. gonna happen, EVER, under any understanding of reality.
E V E R.
Well, sounds trivial then. Why don't you ping Elon Musk and I'm sure by next week you'll be breaking ground! You've only been dreaming about this for a quarter century now!
What delusional fantasy nonsense.
The amount of solar energy passing the Earth, closer than the Moon's orbit...
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are you talking about a disk sized collector the size of the Moon's orbit?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
In fact, it is the AC who is in denial and delusional in his belief that this is a doomed area.
The limiting factor is the fact that the projectile is discharged into air, with huge drag.
If you look at the rail guns made by the US military, you can see the plasma created by travel through the air after it exits the vacuum seal = huge drag. Even a 20 KM vacuum tunnel at a 45 degree angle that discharged at 14 Km above ground would still have a lot of drag to battle, however, we must also realize that every rocket launched must pass through that same regime..
Thus, you might be able to launch a multi stage rocket from an equatorial mountain at 45 degrees to reach a fairly high velocity at about 4 miles up, fulfilling the role of the first stage and the second subsequent stages ignite in the atmosphere after exiting the launch tube.
Would there be a net saving that offsets the cost of the tube? With no need to limit the acceleration to human limits, it might be well suited to supply missions.
SO, with the mission cost being over 1.6 billion for this mission, why did it not have a RTG, RITEG and/or other Pu/Nuclear Battery? I realize solar and other chic renewable rechargeable green technologies are all the rage these days, but when reliable electrical power for critical mission status is required, accept no substitutes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...