Fascinating Rosetta Image Captures Philae's Comet Bounce 69
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."
The Who? (Score:1)
Just hire a pinball wizard to figure it all out.
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...but feminism. :(
Re:Fucking disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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> 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
Re:Fucking disaster (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Fucking disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
not disaster (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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You Americans and your petty envy.
Re:Fucking disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Odds are it's already in a martian chop shop.... (Score:2, Funny)
Never put 20 inch rims on your lander.
Can Rosetta power Philae? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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Even if Rosetta could be used as a mirror, which I doubt, it is probably far too small to do that efficiently.
Also, assuming that you could move Rosetta very close to the comet to reflect enough light then it would be subject to its gravity.
This is a small force but Rosetta would not be able to stay perfectly stationnary so the effect would not last for very long.
Re:Can Rosetta power Philae? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think you'd be better off sending Bruce Willis and a drill. Pull one of the Shuttles out of retirement, get J.J. Abrams to direct the thing and there is a chance that it would work out.
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They had backups, but those also failed. Also, no part of the lander could be considered a single point of failure in the big picture since the orbiter had the more important gear. They revised the design at one point on the recommendation that the orbiter was better suited for getting some of the composition and mapping data that was the main goal of the project, so the lander was scaled back. Adding more mass to the orbiter at the expense of other stuff it was carrying to support the lander would be st
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Asked and answered (although I'd need hours to find the tweet with the answer by the ESA to this exact question)
The answer was:
"No, because solar panels are done to absorb light, not reflect it."
Imagine when Philae is re-discovered (Score:1)
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.
"...moving east." (Score:2)
East. Now in space.
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Well, yeah. The comet rotates. The direction of its rotation is east. It's as good a coordinate system as any.
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East. Now in space.
It has always been in space, it is the rotational direction where the sun rises.
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I'm just going to hazard a guess and say that the cardinal directions have to do with the magnetic field of the body itself. At least, that's what I always thought growing up.
i.e. If we were to go to Mars, we'd define the poles as North and South (not sure if there are specific characteristics or if we just pick randomly), then define East/West based on that.
This comet probably doesn't have a magnetic field though.
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... except on Discworld [wikipedia.org] where:
"Cardinal directions within the Discworld are not given as North, South, East and West, but rather as directions relating to the disc itself: Hubward (towards the centre), Rimward (away from the centre) and to a lesser extent, turnwise (direction of the disc's rotation) and widdershins."
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East. Now in space.
It has always been in space, it is the rotational direction where the sun rises.
I thought the sun stayed more or less in the same place.
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It was? Oh well, I blew it.
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What if it is spinning on more than one axis, ie tumbling? The direction where the sun rises for a given point on the comet will change all the time.
I have no idea if the comet is actually doing this, but I imagine that being a scenario where computing "east" being rather difficult.
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What if it is spinning on more than one axis, ie tumbling? The direction where the sun rises for a given point on the comet will change all the time.
I have no idea if the comet is actually doing this, but I imagine that being a scenario where computing "east" being rather difficult.
A ball at least can only rotate around one axis (any superposition of two rotations can be described as a single combined rotation), but the poster above me had the better answer. East is the direction of the rotation, it just happens to also be where everything stationary or far away that is not constantly visible would rise.
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I checked that for one of the previous posts: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2... [esa.int] lists the declination and ascension of its axis of rotation so the wobble must be modest.
And here's asteroid Toutasis. It wobbles. http://www.solarviews.com/raw/... [solarviews.com]
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It has always been in space, it is the rotational direction where the sun rises.
Don't think though. East is basically Right on the pictures, based on Rosetta (camera) direction.
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That's easy, opposite of west.
Look for a loud shirt? (Score:1, Funny)
And listen for the shouts of the perpetually outraged?
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Where is "east" on the comet?
The comet's axis which appears to spin in a counterclockwise direction from above is its north pole. From a location in which the pole is perpendicular to the angle of view, east is the direction against the comet's rotation, i.e. the direction which appears to be rotating towards you.
Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult to imagine for a non-spherical object, but it works out.