Philae Found • Hacker News Board

"At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae’s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures."

I looked at the pictures and the human eye can barely see the lander. Considering that the chances of losing these landers is not that low, I don't understand why they don't make them visually more distinctive.

Andrew Ng gave a talk recently where he talks about designing the autonomous cars not for aesthetics, but predictability (via visual distinctiveness). [1] In the same spirit, shouldn't there be efforts to make these spacecraft modules more visually distinctive?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eJhcxfYR4I&t=16m35s

Re: Philae Found

#15

Post by matt-attack » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 2:45 PM UTC

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #14

"At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae’s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures." I looked at the pictures and the human eye can barely see the lander. Considering that the chances of losing these landers is not that low, I don't understand why they don't make them visually more distinctive. An…

I'm confused about the appearance of autonomous cars. When is the car observing itself? How does its own appearance come into play?

Re: Philae Found

#16

Post by whamlastxmas » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #14

"At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae’s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures." I looked at the pictures and the human eye can barely see the lander. Considering that the chances of losing these landers is not that low, I don't understand why they don't make them visually more distinctive. An…

My entirely uneducated guess is that a layer of paint would impede the cooling of electronics that depend on the housing to dissipate heat.Paint would also absorb more solar heat than plain metal.

Re: Philae Found

#17

Post by ragebol » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 2:46 PM UTC

gokhan wrote: post #9

Unless other parts of the comet is more flat, that landing gear design seems clearly wrong. It included bolting itself to the surface, if I remember correctly, but it seems almost impossible to fixate three legs with almost no gravity on that surface.

IIRC, the designers had little idea what kind of surface the comet would have. Could be ice, could be rocks, could be dust.

What kind of landing gear + fixation gear would have been better?

Re: Philae Found

#18

Post by luso_brazilian » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 2:48 PM UTC

The XKCD already updated the live comic about this subject [1].

All panels are available at its sister wiki [2]

In my opinion it is a beautiful work of art, pushing the limits of what the media allow the artist to do (the media in this case being comic strips in the webcomic format.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1446/

[2] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1446:_Landing/All...

Re: Philae Found

#19

Post by mardoqueo » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 2:49 PM UTC

miviiida :)

Re: Philae Found

#20

Post by thr0waway1239 » Mon, Sep 05, 2016, 2:53 PM UTC

matt-attack wrote: post #15

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #14

"At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae’s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures." I looked at the pictures and the human eye can barely see the lander. Considering that the chances of losing these landers is not that low, I don't understand why they don't make them visually more distinctive. An…

I'm confused about the appearance of autonomous cars. When is the car observing itself? How does its own appearance come into play?

I believe he is talking about an autonomy-enabled region, which is full of autonomous cars. It includes things such as modifying even the road infrastructure.