Slashdot Mirror
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.
Have you ever actually worked on a project like that? You don't get an unlimited engineering, time or weight budget. You sometimes have to make guesses and assumptions. Sometimes those don't entirely work out. You almost never get to make it as robust as you would like.
Not to mention that no one had ever done this before. You know, 'boldly go where no one has gone before' type thing.
Reality is a bitch at times.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Landing on a comet had never been done before, and the engineers didn't even know what the surface looked like, much less that it had this amazing double shape and rugate surface.
There are two approaches to doing something that's never been done before: (1) Try something and see what the problems are, (2) Think out every possible trouble area that might manifest, and make sure that you can deal with that. Approach 2 sounds much better, but when you take that approach, the vast majority of problems you're designing to deal with are ones that don't actually occur, and as a result the engineering cost is much, much higher.
They designed a lander that would operate on batteries in the worst case, and would stick to the surface with their harpoon and operate on solar arrays in the best case. They got the worst case-- and, because they designed it to operate even in the worst case of landing in an adverse location at a bad orientation, they got data.
They did good. And they got good engineering information to use on later missions.