Does anyone know why communication is being shut down? Can they leave it on so we can get telemetry?
Philae Found
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Re: Philae Found
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SpaceX comparison is bad because they don't do science missions. SpaceX do commercial launches for paying customers. Mission success is defined by whether the payload gets to its intended orbit, unharmed. Even if SpaceX learn a lot from a mission, if the payload is lost then the mission failed. While one can learn from failures, when the mission is not a test, learning is not enough for the mission to be called a…
SpaceX has done quite a few missions to develop their rockets before getting contracts from NASA, etc. Some of those also included payloads.
SpaceX did three kinds of flights:
1. Launch contracts for paying customers where mission success was defined as "unharmed payload to correct orbit".
2. Test/demo missions with mass simulator instead of payload where mission success was defined as "unharmed payload to correct orbit" (two missions: Falcon 1 Flight 4 [0] and Falcon 9 Flight 1 [1]).
3. Rocket landing development flights with Grasshopper where mission success was defined as advancing the ability to land the booster.
SpaceX did R&D on all flights (for example they unsuccessfully tried parachute recovery), but for all flights of Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 (not Grasshopper), they always stated that mission success is to get the customer's payload unharmed to the correct orbit, or to demonstrate the ability to get the customer's payload unharmed to the correct orbit. If they defined mission success as anything else, a potential customer might think SpaceX would sacrifice the payload to advance SpaceX's own goals (like recoverability R&D), and this customer would not fly with SpaceX.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratsat
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Spacecraft_Qualificatio...
Re: Philae Found
#93"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.
Adding paint means adding mass, and the final stage of a space mission is very sensitive to adding mass.
Re: Philae Found
#94I 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…
There's also the argument for doing things a better way. Our propulsion systems suck, which is why we're having to send robots to comets instead of humans. Humans don't get stuck in cracks. Robots get stuck in cracks because they have no clue how to measure things they've never seen before.
Re: Philae Found
#95I 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…
There's also the argument for doing things a better way. Our propulsion systems suck, which is why we're having to send robots to comets instead of humans. Humans don't get stuck in cracks. Robots get stuck in cracks because they have no clue how to measure things they've never seen before.
Come on. Propulsion is far from the first reason we're not sending humans to comets -- safety, risk, mass, need for return, habitability.
Re: Philae Found
#96NASA and ESA's recent push to land things on comets and asteroids makes me pause and wonder if they have in the last decade or so calculated the orbit of an object that concerns them.
Finding near earth objects is done in the open: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
The succession of missions (going back 20 years now) is here: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/#spacecraft
Re: Philae Found
#97I 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…
There's also the argument for doing things a better way. Our propulsion systems suck, which is why we're having to send robots to comets instead of humans. Humans don't get stuck in cracks. Robots get stuck in cracks because they have no clue how to measure things they've never seen before.
> Humans don't get stuck in cracks.
Re: Philae Found
#98At 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.
Re: Philae Found
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the argument for doing things a better way. Our propulsion systems suck, which is why we're having to send robots to comets instead of humans. Humans don't get stuck in cracks. Robots get stuck in cracks because they have no clue how to measure things they've never seen before.
Come on. Propulsion is far from the first reason we're not sending humans to comets -- safety, risk, mass, need for return, habitability.
All those things are inseparable from propulsion.
Re: Philae Found
#100I 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…
There's also the argument for doing things a better way. Our propulsion systems suck, which is why we're having to send robots to comets instead of humans. Humans don't get stuck in cracks. Robots get stuck in cracks because they have no clue how to measure things they've never seen before.
Yeah I'm surprised there aren't more humans volunteering to get blasted onto a moving comet with no way to get back off it, seems very safe.