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Fascinating Rosetta Image Captures Philae's Comet Bounce
mpicpp points out that high-resolution pictures have been released of Philae's landing. "The hunt for Rosetta's lost lander Philae is gaining steam as scientists pore over images from above the comet that may help reveal its final location. The ESA released an image Monday taken by Rosetta's OSIRIS camera showing Philae's first bounce on the comet. The mosaic includes a series of pictures tracking the lander descending toward the comet, the initial touchdown point and then an image of the lander moving east. 'The imaging team is confident that combining the CONSERT ranging data with OSIRIS and navcam images from the orbiter and images from near the surface and on it from Philae's ROLIS and CIVA cameras will soon reveal the lander's whereabouts,' says the ESA."
Just hire a pinball wizard to figure it all out.
Table-ized A.I.
Never put 20 inch rims on your lander.
I haven't really been following this too closely so this may be entirely impossible, but if Philae is located, could Rosetta be positioned to reflect enough sunlight onto Philae to help power it?
Imagine millions of years from now if some civilization come upon this asteroid, and their awe and astonishment when they find this forgotten, dusty satellite, resting in the shadows beneath a crevice.
East. Now in space.
Huh? But your mom wears lipstick.. So yes, you can.
and then an image of the lander moving east
What is east on a comet?
You forget the most important thing that occurred, which is the shirt the scientist was wearing when interviewed on TV. Why that shirt was not in proper style. The horror!
And listen for the shouts of the perpetually outraged?
Hey, they've done something that nobody has done before. Kudos are in order. Low-gravity landings on giant loose lint-balls are still new territory.
The amount of science returned is still unknown because they are still sifting the data. At the very least, they got close-up photos of the surface of a comet for geologists to study.
I hope they take their lessons and make a better comet mission.
Remember, the US Ranger program took 7 tries before they had success. The comet mission had partial success on the first try! Practice makes perfect.
Perhaps they can make the next one spherical and not require any particular landing orientation. Put wire-frame bumpers on it and let it go ahead and bounce. It can adjust its angle after a landing.
Table-ized A.I.
aw, c'mon now!
everyone in the known universe wanted to see those harpoons...they didn't launch...that's a failure...
same with the retro-booster
but it is nonsense to call it a disaster
a 'disaster' is a shuttle exploding, or a probe failing because of metric/english unit conversion errors (google it)...
for this mission...if Rosetta had missed it entirely, no rendevous...or if the lander had totally not worked...maybe that's a 'disaster'
but this is not that
Thank you Dave Raggett
...but feminism. :(
You Americans and your petty envy.
The purpose of the mission wasn't just to land something on the surface and have it continuously live stream.
They still have the orbiter with a big instrument suite, which will continue to provide useful data.
The lander had two goals. One was to operate all the instruments and collect data at least once. The non-rechargable 1200Wh Li/SOCl2 batteries allowed this to happen, exactly as planned, even without the sun. It didn't land where planned, but it did land, collect the data, and transmit it.
The second part was a longer term monitoring, which the solar cells recharge the smaller 150Wh Li-Ion batteries to support. This is the part that's in jeopardy.
Remember Voyager 1, the probe sent out in 1977 that's 18 light hours away? The Plasma Spectrometer and Photopolarimeter System sensors were defective. Four others sensors had to be disabled because it's running out of power. What a colossal boondoggle.
You'd have a point if the problem had been that the harpoons didn't stick in the comet; but they didn't fire.
In different words, you agree then that this comet landing was not actually a success.
The Deep Impact mission got incredibly close up pictures of the surface of a comet in 2005 right before it impacted. Of course in 2005 it was intentional.
No one is calling the ESA team bad people, but I think on a sliding scale of "abysmal failure" to "miraculous success" this falls near "pretty disappointing" considering that its claim to fame did not go as hoped.
Meanwhile the Opportunity rover keeps rolling along.
Put something in orbit. CHECK
Land on a comet. CHECK
Perform sciency stuff: CHECK
The landing wasn't perfect. All the sciency stuff was complete at a little over 80% accomplished.
Measure this in scientific progress, not scientific perfection. If you are looking for perfection on the first attempt of anything, get out of science.
A summary, for those who were fortunate enough to miss this:
/. pretending that a handful of articles about a shitty T-shirt and a subsequent "forced" apology show that lolfeminists, even those with PhDs in relevant, don't care about this mission.
1. Dude wears a shirt with scantily-clad women. Some people say it's kinda sexist.
2. Dude sincerely apologizes. Those who complained accept.
3. Everyone moves on. Lessons learned. Yay! Pretty comet pictures!
4. LOL just kidding. A bunch of "supporters" who won't STFU see this is a great opportunity to attack straw feminists and comment on every single article mentioning the mission. Those who objected to his shirt, typically women scientists/engineers, are slandered as "taking away from his accomplishments" despite writing about this mission for, in some cases, years. Assholes start an Indiegogo campaign to buy him, specifically, a watch for being "bullied," which is forcing him to deal with a situation he's clearly ready to move on from. MRA and GamerGate types congregate, attacking and doxxing anyone who had the slightest of problems with his shirt.
So of course we have folks on
Some equipment didn't work, but the mission objective was still accomplished. The science data they set out to collect was still obtained. I call that a success.
By your logic, Apollo 11 was not a success because Armstrong had to resort to manual control when landing.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
"abysmal failure" to "miraculous success" this falls near "pretty disappointing" considering that its claim to fame did not go as hoped.
Yeah, disappointing to those that only care about pretty pictures and flashy soundbites... The orbiter had the vast majority of mission objectives and is achieving those just fine. The scientific objectives of the lander are all being fulfilled. Considering it can't move and many of its instruments point at the ground underneath it, they were of limited use. Every instrument had data recorded, and only one of which was really of any significant use in the long run. That's pretty disappointing, do everything hoped except extra time to take more pictures of the same spot and the one instrument to measure the impact of space weather (which can also be done by the orbiter too)?
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1... would certainly be an attempt to take away from his accomplishments. Fuck off
Where is "east" on the comet?
You left out those of us who don't think it's sexist, but think that it's inappropriate because it's not representative of the team, but an individual, and this individual was being paid to represent the team, not himself.
Frankly, I don't give a fuck if he wears naked ladies on his own time/dime or if he goes naked in the streets on his own time/dime. But when you're paid to represent someone else, you wear the attire that your sponsors expect, because you're taking money to represent them. It's not your time and/or opinions at that point, it's theirs. It's called being a team player and not an attention-seeking douchenozzle.
"The science data they set out to collect was still obtained." Do we really know yet if the probes and drills actually reached down below the surface? It appeared that lander was sticking up and I have my doubts. I think it would be wonderful if they actually got the samples they hoped they would get, but I am not convinced. There is an article behind a pay wall in the WSJ that says an instrument discovered an organic compound that was first detected in the comet’s atmosphere. Says the molecule was detected by an instrument on the lander "sniffing" the comet's atmosphere. Seems there is no more information than that. Hard to say if we can take that to mean they actually got their samples. Sniffing the comet's atmosphere != soil samples.
..and it DID land where planned (the flight dynamics people were bang on the money)... it just didn't stick there.
> But when you're paid to represent someone else
Obviously, then, whoever hired this guy failed utterly. Just kidding. I find it much more likely that whoever hired him, didn't hire him based on the "15 minutes" of public representation he'd end up making at the end of the mission.
And therefore, whoever decided, not that long ago, that he should be the one to be a public representative, failed. It was probably some PHB who doesn't know any of the technical staff well enough to know that this guy needed to be carefully managed in this particular regard.
> and not an attention-seeking douchenozzle
Do you know him personally? Because my guess is that he's probably one of those technically adept, socially inadept people we often meet in our line of work. Especially since I saw a headline that he broke down and cried when he apologized? You'd think that "an attention-seeking douchenozzle" would have just used the apology for... more exposure. Of course, it could have been an act, I guess.
Really?
Hard to know where to start. Firstly the whole landing was just a small part of the mission. The orbiter is still up there and, all being well, will follow the comet in to
perihelion, observing all the way.
Secondly, think about the trade-offs of planning a space probe. You can make things more robust and more redundant, design more conservatively, etc. reducing the risk of things failing, but that costs you mass and power (and possibly money) which are rigidly limited. So you would have to take fewer instruments. The design optimises the expected science return by taking some risks.
The lander was intrinsically high risk, because no one had any idea what the surface of a comet is like. They had to gave it a bunch of different ways of hanging on designed around some plausible guesses. The lander has no propulsion at all (those mass trade-offs again), so it has to put up with wherever it hits. They knew solar power on the surface was uncertain, so they had enough juice in the non-rechargable battery to do the highest priority science.
In the event, two systems failed -- the cold gas hold down thruster and the harpoons. No one knows why yet, but building systems on a very tight mass budget that can work after 10 years in space is not easy. In addition, the surface of the comet seems to be harder than anyone really expected.
Given the challenges, getting any science at all back from the lander is amazing and a bonus to the main mission which is the orbiter.
"the surface of the comet seems to be harder than anyone really expected."
Can you explain why it seems so important to think the comet is made of ice rather than rock? It looks like rock, it is as hard as rock, yet they still seem to think it is ice.
Fuck me, i try to get away from this retarded fake feminism that mostly MALE tech "journalists" seem to love spreading as click bate for the masses. They must make a fuck tonne of advertising to keep posting this crap.
Its a shirt with a CARTOON on, Jesus. I'm off to watch some hardcore porn, that's some real exploitation, just the same as all the White Knight tech bloggers flood us with this shit do every night.
2. Dude sincerely apologizes. Those who complained accept.
Ahahahahaha, you clearly don't know SJWs. They don't do "accepting apologies". It's just not a concept they comprehend.
What they do whenever someone gives them whatever they're asking for is simply move the goalposts and start demanding more. The best strategy for SJWs is to just flat-out ignore them. They'll never be happy and they exist solely to complain.
>MRA and GamerGate types congregate
You Gawker "journalists" are alway so desperate to introduce their political enemies into their attacks, even when there isn't a link.
You're no better than the kids on Stormfront screaming "It must have been the Jews!"
Not surprising that it was an "anti-GamerGate Journalist" that broke the story about the offensive shirt. Especially when the obvious backlash they were going to receive for it would be oh-so-gracefully deflected and dumped onto people you already hate.
>I don't give a fuck if he wears naked ladies on his own time/dime or if he goes naked in the streets on his own time/dime. It's not your time and/or opinions at that point, it's theirs.
So when a school asks a young lady to dress appropriately for the classroom why do feminists howl so loudly about it? If they want to dress like sluts they have their own time to do so. You are in an establishment of learning, not a dance club... act like it.
Oh that's right... rules and standards don't apply to women. That's what they call "equality."
I don't see how that follows from the quoted text.
Regarding the harpoon, many "successful" US missions also had problem spots. For example, Galileo's main antenna didn't open, greatly limiting imaging data, but still did lots of other measurements. And its atmosphere probe had a key part on backward, but got lucky and still managed to work. Voyager's antenna boom kept shifting around, missing some key shots. Pioneer 10 and 11 got confused by Jupiter's radiation and missed a couple of moon photos. Viking 2's seismometer didn't work. Apollo 11's guidance computer got swamped with processing jobs and stopped working. Spirit's memory got full, stopping all work for a couple of weeks.
There is no AAA out there: you improvise and cross your fingers.
Table-ized A.I.
A couple weeks ago, while browsing around the library downtown, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, Bennett Haselton -- the messiah himself -- came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was busy and in any case I was sure he wouldn't even acknowledge a mere mortal like me.
As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as his cock -- or at least as I imagined it!
I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I've been on the internet a long time, but Bennett Haselton is the first real Voice of the Internet, bringing new for nerds and stuff that matters back to Slashdot! Of course I'd had fantasies of meeting him, sucking his cock and balls, not to mention sucking his asshole clean, but I never imagined I would have the chance. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of Bennett Haselton, the chosen one.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?
I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled.
I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big half nigger cock, beating my meat like a madman. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was that Bennett Haselton wasn't there to see my loyalty and wash it down with his piss.
I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. It's even better than reading one of Bennett's articles!
Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
I often think of Bennett Haselton dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful Slashdot reader.
> Dude wears a shirt with scantily-clad women. Some people say it's kinda sexist.
This is grossly understating what has actually been said. "Some" people include columnists in major publications, and "kinda" is not exactly the word they used.