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At some point in the future, someone is going to fly to that comet, land, get out of their vessel and walk over to Philae and smile, give it a pat on the head, and then take it home; someone in the future is going to be lucky enough to experience that task and become a part of its history.
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If you have awesome propulsion then you can just bring a shitload of shielding mass.
But use of such a system requires development, testing, and flight qualification, affecting cost, schedule, and risk. It will also affect other variables, like volume. Focusing on a point solution like "propulsion" is not even the right kind of question to answer "why not solve this problem with humans?".
These are all a lot easier if you are not worried about mass anymore. Just give all your structures a 3x safety factor like a bridge, and bring extras of anything complicated. Heck bring a mechanic and tools, too.
Of course this is all fantasy, which was the point of this subthread under kordless, in the first place.
EDIT
> Focusing on a point solution like "propulsion" is not even the right kind of question to answer "why not solve this problem with humans?".
To be more clear: I agree with you. I'm just playing the idea of "what if we had much better propulsion." But of course we don't, so in real life, we do need to carefully consider the factors you mention.
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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?
INANE (I Am Not A NASA Engineer), but perhaps 4 or better yet more legs arranged in a tetrahedron or analogous polyhedron would better ensure the lander did not get stuck inside a crevasse; an inner rotating body could then bring the lander into a working position. The more the legs, the higher the chance the lander could 'roll' to a lower ground when initially bouncing off the surface, but the optimal number of legs…
Neither are the people who worked on this lander :)
Compared to the rest of the achievements of this mission, it seems like this should have been relatively easy: 67P is all of like 2.5 miles wide and the orbit is at like 10 miles. You'd think that a few high res photos in a single orbit would capture nearly every inch of the entire rock.
I watched this documentary called "To catch a comet" about the Rosette/Philae mission to comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The achievement of getting to the comet and landing Philae, like many other achievements in space, is really phenomenal. So many things could've gone wrong, but the fact that the worst was Philae bouncing and getting stuck in a dark place (and not being able to perform fully) is a huge success beset b…
You're a lost cause if you believe something so ludicrous actually happened.
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Scientifically speaking, a successful mission is one where you've gathered all the data for analysis and can work with it long after the mission is over. It's like, if SpaceX launches a rocket and it explodes - a real failure would be if they captured no telemetry and had no idea what happened vs knowing everything that happened and being able to replay the mission after the fact. Often times the data is far more imp…
I cannot think of any situation where the rocket exploding on the pad would not cause the mission to be considered a failure.
At some point in the future, someone is going to fly to that comet, land, get out of their vessel and walk over to Philae and smile, give it a pat on the head, and then take it home; someone in the future is going to be lucky enough to experience that task and become a part of its history.
At some point in the future, someone is going to fly to that comet, land, get out of their vessel and walk over to Philae and smile, give it a pat on the head, and then take it home; someone in the future is going to be lucky enough to experience that task and become a part of its history.
And it might still work. One of the neat things about Philae is that it's rated to withstand temperatures down to −60 °C. Most other space probes(and electronics in general) are not rated for such low temperatures and will experience solder joint failures if such temperatures are reached. Most space probes stay above their failure temperature with heaters, if said heaters fail, the space probe dies and won't function…
I watched this documentary called "To catch a comet" about the Rosette/Philae mission to comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The achievement of getting to the comet and landing Philae, like many other achievements in space, is really phenomenal. So many things could've gone wrong, but the fact that the worst was Philae bouncing and getting stuck in a dark place (and not being able to perform fully) is a huge success beset b…
I would recommend everyone who hasn't done so already watch the trajectory of Rosette[1]. 1. https://youtu.be/ktrtvCvZb28
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it's not worth it scientifically to use a bayer filter. if there's a color shot, it's usually false color or three successive shots with a R/G/B filter separately. this spacecraft may not have such filters available as the comet is expected to be about as colorful as a lump of coal.
Anular velocity might also be too high to get a suitable impression. Three separate scans would be shifted leaving a rainbow-blurred image. Still lifes are easier (e.g., geostationary shots of Earth, Mars rover shots).
