Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

Not sure if a 4Km comet has a deep gravity well, and tbf, the Rosetta spacecraft has travelled 6 billion Km to match orbits/velocity with something traveling at 65,000 KpH - probably a bit more difficult hitting a bookshelf from across the room (unless your room is 40 AU wide, and you used your bed and wardrobe to provide slingshot manoeuvres.... ;))

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

It's got a big enough gravity well for Rosetta to have been orbiting it for the last few months :)

Sure, getting there, from Earth, was a long journey. Being dropped from 30km up and hitting a 4km target that inherently draws everything towards it, isn't a particularly impressive achievement. Coupled with the fact that all three retention mechanisms that were meant to hold the thing down on touchdown failed to operate, and the fact they don't know if they actually hit their target because they can't actually locate where it went... the only thing that'd make the landing impressive is if the lander's odd behavior was because it had been abducted by aliens.

Given there's dozens of computer game plugins that can do it at a click of a button, the math behind getting something from A to B in space is actually quite simple. The hard part is building and launching hardware advanced enough and reliable enough to do it, and to be fair, all the important hardware failed today so er... meh.

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

Looks like it really is on the surface now, although it may have bounced up to 100 metres back upwards after its first touchdown.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30034060

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

Nah, it bounced twice. First bounce sent it over a kilometre up and it flipped around for a good two hours before the second bounce that was around 100m and 7 minutes long.

Apparently it's now stuck on it's side in a cave and about to die:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...bled-side.html

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

Gone into sleep mode after sending back it's latest burst of data

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30058176

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

It's alive!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33126885

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

First Contact? ;)

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

A whole 85 seconds of connectivity during 6 months.

That level of uptime makes even VM's reliability look spectacular :-P

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

I think, if we reflect on many SF books and films, when a robot is re-activated after a period of time without human intervention, this scenario never ends well......

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

Hah! Thankfully this robot has no engines and can barely move its legs.

Re: Rosetta comet landing due today
 

Maybe cosmic radiation will cause it to mutate and return to Earth to wreak terrible revenge on its creators... :erm:

:)