Rosetta has touched down!

Cool

Very exciting news. As important as the moonlandings, imho.

Scientific advancement a decade in the making. Fantastic!

Really, really cool. I hope it's able to send data for a long while!

Not going to lie. I burst into tears when they announced confirmation of its landing. What an incredible achievement (not the crying, but the catching a comet).

Awesome indeed. And here's what the comet sounds like.

Not sure what I was expecting the comet to sound like, but it certainly wasn't that.

Rosetta has touched down!

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And Twitter is missing the point.

tsk

Everyone's a critic....

mccardey said:

And Twitter is missing the point.

tsk

Everyone's a critic....

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Sorry, but I thought those tweets were pretty funny.

I'm a huge fan and supporter of space exploration. The technological expertise involved and landing on that comet is simply mind-boggling. But still, there's nothing wrong with exhibiting a sense of humor.

rugcat said:

Sorry, but I thought those tweets were pretty funny.
<<snip>>
there's nothing wrong with exhibiting a sense of humor.

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Yeah - it's meant pretty lightly.

[A]n anchoring system problem may hamper planned investigations into the origins of Earth and the solar system. The 100-kilogram (220-pound) lander – virtually weightless on the comet’s surface – touched down on schedule at about 11 a.m. ET after a seven-hour descent from its orbiting mothership Rosetta, now located a half-billion kilometers (300 million miles) from Earth. But during the free-fall to the comet’s surface, harpoons designed to anchor the probe, named Philae, failed to deploy. Flight directors are considering options to ensure the lander does not drift back into space.

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here's hoping they get this resolved. if they find water/ice, humanity is going to turn a huge corner in its understanding of life.

badass.


(source)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/12/us-space-comet-idUSKCN0IW0S520141112

The landing pads have screws on the bottom....but they need solid rock to bore into to be able to hold securely. Loose rubble or dust could be a problem.

This is great in so many ways, including seeing an entity other than "the Space Superpowers" (NASA, Russia/former Soviets and China)" doing something that's both significant and that gets lots of press coverage. I've mostly heard of ESA as an entity that launches commercial satellites rather than doing the "risky" thing of exploration (though as shown in recent weeks, it's all risky).

mccardey said:

And Twitter is missing the point.

tsk

Everyone's a critic....

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Oh. The hashtag is #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant. It's just (for anyone too young to remember) the new replacement for "They can land a man on the Moon, why can't they <insert thing speaker thinks should have been done by now>*" kind of thing. I heard that for a decade or two after the Moon landings. Then I think people realized they couldn't land a man on the Moon anymore.

At least now there's another "They can <do a great accomplishment in outer space>" thing to compare the pitfalls (first-world problems?) of modern life to.

* I recall this being used perhaps by Archie Bunker in "All In The Family" (or it seems like something he would say) and in at least one TV commercial. It could have been something like "... why can't they make an antacid that tastes good?" The comparisons were always something inane like that.

benbradley said:

Oh. The hashtag is #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant. It's just (for anyone too young to remember) the new replacement for "They can land a man on the Moon, why can't they <insert thing speaker thinks should have been done by now>*" kind of thing. I heard that for a decade or two after the Moon landings. Then I think people realized they couldn't land a man on the Moon anymore.

At least now there's another "They can <do a great accomplishment in outer space>" thing to compare the pitfalls (first-world problems?) of modern life to.

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'zackly

Gregg said:

The landing pads have screws on the bottom....but they need solid rock to bore into to be able to hold securely. Loose rubble or dust could be a problem.

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They also have harpoons they will shoot into the surface, which may hold in loose rubble, but they were also designed for the ice they expected.

There were reports that the harpoons didn't work - never fired.

Latest news and photo:

"
The historic Philae comet probe hit its target, but then unexpectedly bounced twice, settling in the shadow of a cliff that could hinder its research, new images sent back Thursday showed.
Philae is designed to run a suite of crucial scientific experiments for an initial 2 1/2 days on primary battery power, after which it is expected to receive power from solar panels that could keep it functioning for an additional three months.
But because of the awkward touchdown, the lander is now getting only 1 1/2 hours of sunlight per day instead of the planned seven hours—a scenario that could seriously curtail the probe’s ability to operate.
At a press briefing in Darmstadt, Germany, scientists working on the Rosetta mission said that systems aboard the Philae lander failed to secure it to the comet’s surface"



http://online.wsj.com/articles/rosetta-mission-releases-first-images-from-philae-probe-1415881931

Hey, ben, NASA helped! I have a friend who used to work for NASA (Mars stuff), so I'm a bit like a groupie

Congrats to everyone who brought this thing together and to the folks who paid for it, because it's amazing!

Except maybe for the harpoon engineer. *Kidding!*

I missed all the excitement and I never clicked to open this thread because I thought, "Who cares about a language program?"

The Philea probe was dropped down to a comet 67P's landing site Agilkia(or up depending on a point of reference) from the Rosetta spacecraft.


It failed to activate its thrusters, failed to deploy its anchoring harpoons and bounced off the comet surface like a bouncing ball only to come to a stop some kilometers away from an intended landing site.

And as luck would not have it, Philea chose to settle into a dark corner.



Houston, we've had a problem here, or should we say Darmstadt instead.

Despite the problems faced, it's pretty damned amazing and cool at what has been achieved. Has anyone seen any of the pics taken? Pictures taken from the SURFACE OF A COMET!!! Absolutely awesome!

check these photos out:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...etta-images-show-soaring-1km-comet-cliff.html

Dramatic images of a comet hurtling through space some 250 million miles from Earth have revealed a stunning landscape of towering cliffs soaring above a rugged surface strewn with giant boulders.

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this is even more intriguing:

The walls of rock are more than half a mile high, but the low surface gravity of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko probably means that a human would survive a jump from its top.

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... which means they would probably survive being pushed off as well.

nice.