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Long-Lost Comet Lander Philae Found (seeker.com)
astroengine writes: With only a month before its mission ends, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission swooped low over Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko to see the stranded Philae lander jammed in a crack. After months of searching for the lander, which made its dramatic touchdown on Nov. 14, 2014, mission scientists had a good idea as to the region the robot was in, but this is the first photographic proof of the lander, on its side, stuck in the craggy location called Abydos. "This wonderful news means that we now have the missing 'ground-truth' information needed to put Philae's three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is!" said Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor in a statement.
Fantastic news! Hopefully the next lander will solve the problems that Philae had and work on a new way of landing on space rocks.
Too bad mission control could not admit their failure, I would have. Sure they gathered some data, but it was an overall and overwhelming fail, and it was so lame how they downplayed it. Not being able to admit flaws and failures points to a very weak character.
This is one area where using an advanced AI for the landing, when they are perfected, could have saved the mission and salvaged a big part of the science the mission was supposed to do.
You are right. They could have also 3D printed a new lander using in-situ comet resources, instead of using LUDDITE factory-made components launched by a LUDDITE rocket.
3D printers launched by EM drives are the future!
Free market American would mean it's Chinese then. Just sayin'.
Rescue mission!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And quadrupled the weight.
The lander had batteries sized to provide enough power for the primary science objectives. What was lost was maybe 20% of the planned objectives, not "the majority".
An RTG would have been cool, but it'd have doubled the cost of the mission.
RTG are not allowed in ESA missions.
I don't like to talk bad about the labors of perhaps good engineers, but it did seem there were some issues with the design of this mission. Granted, landing on a comet is a delicate process, however it lacks the extra difficulties that planetary landings have, especially when you have to speed through atmosphere and apart from having to break you have to make sure your instruments are protected from the ordeal. So the fact that (without having the craft go through such an ordeal as atmospheric breaking etc) both methods that Philae had available for a good landing, the gas thruster and the grappling hook, were DOA is pretty bad compared to the performance of other crafts. And forget about the grappling hooks which are unusual, how do you screw up a simple thruster, something that has been implemented in various forms thousands of times for various satellites.
Sure, there was some interesting science gained, but that was not thanks to the part of the team responsible for the landing...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
So how many intergalactic littering laws have we just broken?
Exactly how would that have helped? The lander didn't stick when it landed, and bounced into a chasm. It was in shade, and couldn't use solar power to operate. It also couldn't point its antennae to communicate. How would an AI help at all?
Couldn't get this out of my mind.
Have gnu, will travel.
How could it have salved the science when it already accomplished the vast majority of its science goals? Other than long term plasma and temperature measurements that needed solar power, everything else was designed to be done on battery power. Many of the experiments were limited number of use or couldn't have been powered by the solar panels even in ideal conditions.
Matt Taylor wore a three-piece suit, and PBS totebags were distributed to all.
Nice priorities. Instead or arguing against any comments with actual substance that can be shown to be misguided or flat out wrong, you only reply to the stupid, empty comments that don't need replies. That is a classic sign of a troll more interest in mud wrestling than the cause they pretend to be taking the high road with.
Nice priorities. Instead or arguing against any comments with actual substance that can be shown to be misguided or flat out wrong, you only reply to the stupid, empty comments that don't need replies. That is a classic sign of a troll more interest in mud wrestling than the cause they pretend to be taking the high road with.
Yes the Valtrex worked, though it appears that it is doing nothing for his confidence or his syphillis. He even forgot to log into his 110010001000 account to post his poor excuse for a rebuttal.. LFMAO!
I'm not automatically discounting what you say, but do you have a citation? I went looking (for a while, at that) for weights on a likely RTG vs. batteries and solar panels. The best I came up with was fuel mass for the Cassini mission - 4.8 kg producing 110 watts. http://www.world-nuclear.org/i... - (and Plutonium 238 needs the least amount of shielding for any RTG fuel). Can you provide information on the weight of the solar and battery components?
To be fair, I was thinking of what it "could do" and not just the mission objectives. When I wrote it, I the Opportunity probe in mind, which far exceeded its mission objectives. On Mars, solar panels make pretty good sense. Would a RTG have made better sense here? As a poster below notes, they simply aren't considered in ESA missions.
The one you list was used on the some Mars missions, not Cassini. Cassini used three GPHS-RTG generators, each with 8 kg of plutonium. But that is just the fuel mass, not counting the oxygen, and in your case, the 4.8 kg is just the plutonium oxide mass. The total mass of three GPHS-RTG was more than 150 kg, and produced 600+ W by the end of the mission.
For comparison Juno has ~340 kg of solar panels total, for about 450 W of power. Although it is not quite the minimal mass due to the solar panels being used mechanically to help stabilize the spin of the satellite.
RTGs don't get used due to a limited budget of Pu238, which is pretty much independent of the dollar budget of NASA at this point, and also nearly unavailable to the ESA. If solar panels can be made to work, then you use them because that Pu238 can be save for the missions where solar panels are not an option.
The entire power system of the Philae lander was about 12 kg, including two batteries, the solar panels, and associated electronics. The peak power of the solar panels was designed to be ~32 W, but some of the instruments could peak at more than this. So either an RTG would have to be sized larger, or you would still need a battery as a buffer. Even if you could scale down linearly with size (which is hard to do with something like an RTG), you would need ~0.25 kg/W, so 8 kg, plus a battery still and some mass of electronics. That would be cutting it close.
The bigger issue would be how much value would this add? Some of the instruments were one time deals, taking measurements directly below the lander. Others, like the drill, had a finite number of uses as the ovens were one time use. You would have to basically completely redesign the mission, and need more science payload to take advantage of that RTG, which would add considerably more to the mass budget than any inefficiencies of a small RTG.
Only a matter of time before Apophis comes staffs blazing to reclaim Abydos.
2029 to be exact. Reality is a bitch, you snake.
It completely fails to mention the IMPORTANT thing: what shirt was he wearing at the announcement ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Stuck into a little crack or chasm, you say? Kind of like the probe was a little retracted inside the darkness?
May I suggest a rename of the probe from Philae to Phimosis?
What exactly were you hoping it could do? Most of the instruments couldn't have run longer or would not be able to provide anything new even if there was power? The difference between a rover and a lander, is the lander can only measure the composition of the rock it sits on so many times. After that, it is just a weather station.
And if the landing had gone as planned, the lander would have had plenty of sunlight to work with. And in that situation I'm sure the same people who are now complaining about the lack of an RTG would instead be bitching about the lander carrying a heavy, expensive, and unnecessary RTG that could have been used for something else. Besides, if the lander did put down in the intended location, its likely fate would have been to be cooked to death by the Sun after a few months. A RTD that producing several hundred watts of heat that cannot be shut off would have just hastened its demise.