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Welcome to a comet

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Re: Welcome to a comet

#31

Post by gokhan »

From Reddit[1]:

"Got fresh news from the team, they are broadcasting live right now on french TV ! Philae landed, and bounced slowly for (1-2-? hours), and travelled 1km away the targetted site. Yes 1000m. Then know this because of the datas from the radar. It's now stopped slanted, some cams are shooting the sky, other the ground, and other nearby rocks, as seen on the first photo. It's inside some kind of cave/hole, not much sun for the solar panels.

EDIT1: It landed on the core of the comet, it sees the light from the sun for about 1 to 2 hours per day. In the next days/week the angle of the comet will change/sun, and it very likely the solar panel will get more sunlight so more power for the probe.

EDIT2 : Many labs are performing right now and performed the whole night. For now they put the drilling on hold since they don't know if it's tied to the ground or not. Drilling op was also power hungry so it's kinda a good thing it's on hold since there's not much sun available for the panels. Battery life been re-estimated to 50-55hours due to the lack of sunlight. This time includes the 7 hours of descent.They are constantly adjusting missions goals, depending on conditions, power available, etc,

EDIT3 : The probe has been working to gather scientifict datas the whole time, including during the bounces. There's already a large amount of datas available, whatever happens next.

EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in, it's not burried into soft soil.

EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can communicate with the orbiter, but that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's already a lot of datas transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact between the orbiter and the probe can be approximately done twice per day.

EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned, flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there.

EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at 5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the datas from the first batch of tests."

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2m63hd/first_civa_ima...

Re: Welcome to a comet

#32

Post by viewer5 »

Tepix wrote: post #18
badname wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend. "Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell. Global peace doesn't look very rosy either. Not to mention what's happening on the environmental f…

805 million means the number is down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries. Source: http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/

That's insane, I had no idea there was any improvement, let alone that much! I just casually assumed the number would be growing along with our total global population, but to know it's actually decreasing as population increases? Wow.

Re: Welcome to a comet

#33

Post by avian »

NietTim wrote: post #29
avian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget asteroid Itokawa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa

I think he was talking about actual landings. Hayabusa/its lander MINERVA failed to land

> In November 2005, it landed on the asteroid and collected samples in the form of tiny grains of asteroidal material, which were returned to Earth aboard the spacecraft on 13 June 2010.

(from the Wikipedia article)

Yes, the lander failed, but the bus itself did land on the surface. It was a sample return mission which is in many ways a greater feat.

Re: Welcome to a comet

#34

Post by eggy »

NietTim wrote: post #29
avian wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget asteroid Itokawa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa

I think he was talking about actual landings. Hayabusa/its lander MINERVA failed to land

MINERVA failed to land, but Hayabusa made a series of soft landings on to the asteroid in 2005, and collected samples that were returned to Earth. Pretty amazing in its own right and time.

Re: Welcome to a comet

#35

Post by mapimopi »

Lrigikithumer wrote: post #9

You know I have some bad days some times, but seeing shit like this just makes me think "What a fucking time to be alive!" It's truly incredibly and is sometimes that kick in the pants I need to keep on going. We are living in a golden age of humanity right now, at no point before in human history have so many people had such an incredible quality of life and never before has man been doing such incredible feats and…

Textbook comment right here.

Re: Welcome to a comet

#38

Post by smoyer »

mhandley wrote: post #3
jbogp wrote: post #2

That's a great achievement in any case. I'm just slightly worried from the looks of this picture that Philae actually stabilized on its side. Also the large amount of shadow in the area is worrisome for the solar panels to function properly. Press conference with the release of a full panorama (which will hopefully not confirm the side landing) is scheduled for 1400 CET.

The sunlight appears to be coming from behind and to the left of Philae in this picture, at a fairly low angle, so the back of it should (I hope) be reasonably illuminated at the moment. It's definitely not clear from this picture which way is "up". It looks to me like up may be towards the top right of the picture, in which case Philae may be at a 45 degree angle. But I'm probably wrong - the full panorama should te…

The lander's leg is very well lit and there is clearly nothing underneath it. The antenna appears (based on it's end converging with it's own shadow) to be resting against either a rock or the surface.

I'm not a rocket scientist ... I hope I'm grossly misinterpreting this image!

Re: Welcome to a comet

#39

Post by gpvos »

badname wrote: post #16
Lrigikithumer wrote: post #9

You know I have some bad days some times, but seeing shit like this just makes me think "What a fucking time to be alive!" It's truly incredibly and is sometimes that kick in the pants I need to keep on going. We are living in a golden age of humanity right now, at no point before in human history have so many people had such an incredible quality of life and never before has man been doing such incredible feats and…

Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend. "Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell. Global peace doesn't look very rosy either. Not to mention what's happening on the environmental f…

Of those things, especially if you compare it with, say, a century ago, only the environment is really in trouble. Which is bad enough, of course, but when looking at hunger and peace, we are actually doing pretty well.

Re: Welcome to a comet

#40

Post by [deleted] »

badname wrote: post #16
Lrigikithumer wrote: post #9

You know I have some bad days some times, but seeing shit like this just makes me think "What a fucking time to be alive!" It's truly incredibly and is sometimes that kick in the pants I need to keep on going. We are living in a golden age of humanity right now, at no point before in human history have so many people had such an incredible quality of life and never before has man been doing such incredible feats and…

Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend. "Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell. Global peace doesn't look very rosy either. Not to mention what's happening on the environmental f…

[deleted]
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