Rosetta comet landing due today

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Nonsense as usual. That'd be vaguely accurate only if India was the size of the moon and the nail was the size of Europe. Hitting something 4km wide from 30km away is no harder than hitting a bookshelf from the other side of the room, and that bookshelf had a gravity well that sucked everything towards it nomatter where you aimed.

Fact is they don't even have a clue where it landed, they've already lost the damn thing.

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.... )

[qasdfdsaq]

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.

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

[qasdfdsaq]

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

[Cobbydaler]

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

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

[Derek]

It's alive!

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

The European Space Agency (Esa) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth.
Philae, the first spacecraft to land on a comet, was dropped on to the surface of Comet 67P by its mothership, Rosetta, last November.

First Contact?

[qasdfdsaq]

A whole 85 seconds of connectivity during 6 months.

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

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......

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Hugh

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......

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

[Osem]

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