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.
Not being able to admit flaws and failures points to a very weak character.
Is that why you didn't log in?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
If there was a failure, it wasn't a failure of mission control. Nothing they could have done would have changed the outcome.
The landing had a combination of problems. Harpoons and thrusters not firing (design flaws), and the landing zone having different geology than had been assumed (nobody had landed on a comet before, so no definitive data to go by).
Despite the problems, the mission gathered most of the data they wanted. Not an overwhelming fail by any stretch of the imagination.
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.
You can read the mission objectives they had written before the mission was actually launched and see that they achieved nearly all of them. Unless they have a time machine, there is no failure cover-up and your the one trying to spin things to suit your agenda.
Thanks for that, Armchair Rocket Scientist. Now please tell us all about how Elon Musk is an overrated hack, and why the EMDrive is being suppressed by a conspiracy.
Matt Taylor wore a three-piece suit, and PBS totebags were distributed to all.
EMDrive is real, because it is proven by NASA scientists. NASA! Scientists! NASA!
The thing that really gets me is it's the same people who are guilelessly credulous about the EMDrive and lecture everybody else about having a Proper Scientific Attitude who are also global warming deniers.
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.
It completely fails to mention the IMPORTANT thing: what shirt was he wearing at the announcement ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Granted for the thrusters, but the problems with the harpoons didn't surface until the conclusion of a 9-year-long test of the flight spare in a vacuum. Should they have postponed the launch by 9 years?
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.