Rosetta comet landing – live stream

[sidcool]

Updates: (Animation of where Rosetta is : http://sci.esa.int/where_is_rosetta/)

1. Comet is warmer than expected, estimating presence of dust.

2. Comet has Ammonia based gases in atmosphere and Magnesium in the soil. There is water in small amounts.

3. The gravity is one ten thousandth of that of earth.

4. NASA has a few instrument mounted on Rosetta. The microwave instruments, plasma instruments and Electron analyzer.

5. The landing site has clearly been identified. Rosetta will send 5 high-res images every hour. There were some minor hiccups last night.

6. Many high profile science experiments will be conducted during the first 48 hours after landing. This will be followed by the long term experiments whose results will take time.

7. Rosetta has executed a successful separation phase. The team is ecstatic :)

8. Team has lost contact with the lander, but the spokesman said this was expected and the contact will soon be reestablished.

9. It will be few hours before some new updates.

[fmax30]

Team has regained contact with the lander. Signal received from both the lander and rosetta.

[fla]

They received the confirmation that the lander separation was successful.

EDIT: First lander data expected in about 2 hours from now.

[robertfw]

Harpoons did not actually fire - team is looking at options for refiring

[aruggirello]

> NASA has a few instrument mounted on Rosetta. The microwave instruments, plasma instruments and Electron analyzer.

Which instruments are mounted on Philae?

[ctdonath]

Animation looks good, but the sound seems unnecessary and likely conflicting with other tabs I want/need to listen to.

[huhtenberg]

> 4. NASA ...

You misspelled ESA ;)

[svckr]

Here's _the real_ live stream: https://xkcd.com/1446/

[mikeyouse]

ESA lists 35min to lander separation, Randall lists 65.. I'll definitely keep both windows open, but it sure seems like the ESA site might be quicker on updates for live events!

[kibibyte]

I really quickly hacked together a script (https://github.com/DanGe42/xkcd-1446-fetcher) to fetch every frame starting from the current one so I wouldn't have to keep the page open all night. There's not much more to it than a few modifications I made to Randall's client-side script to make it compatible with Node.js and write to the file system instead. Hopefully it doesn't crash overnight on my server.

[rocco]

lacks only of a counter in title tag that signals a page update. (like Twitter, Facebook ect.)

[Heliosmaster]

strangely enough, does not work for me on chrome on osx :(

[frabcus]

The pins puncturing the cold-gas jet system on Philae have apparently failed - which will make it harder to stay on the surface.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/1111232...

Still has two harpoons and ice screws!

[chime]

Another article on the matter: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/12/rosetta-and-philae-g...

Like they said, here's hoping that it doesn't land on a boulder or a slope.

[aruggirello]

There is a possibility the pins actually worked. I think they are going to attempt to fire the thruster anyway.

[kkitay]

Philae landing confirmed—receiving data—"harpoon fired and rewound".

[Sami_Lehtinen]

Is it just me, or do you find it silly that ESA live stream shows Jessie J advertising. I find it rather strange, but maybe they're just so cash deprived. Hmm? Maybe corporate executive investor dashboard should also show random high end product ads? Would it be a good or bad idea? - Maybe the mission failed, and they thought that showing music videos instead of something bad would be cool. Isn't that great idea for future space missions? Let's show "cool" music videos, if things go bad. So people can just be happy and don't need to worry or care what happened.

[3rd3]

I wouldn’t mind it if it wasn’t produced so badly and wasn’t played in a continuous loop.

[joezydeco]

Where are you seeing ads? I don't see anything like that.

And if they are, so what? Does this all need to be Super High Serious stuff?

[Cowicide]

I just now watched their reaction after the successful separation where it's now on its way to landing on the comet. Very cool, thanks for posting this! The video stream was flawless, by the way, with great quality audio and video. Apple and others should learn from them how to do streaming right.

[joering2]

Can someone actually explain me how is it possible to even rendezvous with an object that moves so fast and is so violent? I mean, this is not a Moon orbiting a Planet, but rather a very violent object storming through the Universe.

[robin_reala]

Movement in space is relative. The probe effectively caught up to the back of the comet as it was coming back in towards the sun. This image from the Guardian is slightly outdated but presents the path Rosetta’s taken well:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/20...

As for violence, I assume you’re talking about the comet’s tail? This happens when comets approach their perihelion and the sun heats them up. The heat starts a process of outgassing from the comet which the solar wind blows away (the tail of a comet always points away from the sun). Rosetta’s target isn’t close enough to the sun at the moment for this to be problematic.

[Sharlin]

The 67P is a short-period comet. Its orbit is quite elliptical, yes, but nowhere near as elliptical as those of long-period comets, arriving from the Kuiper belt or even farther from the freezing outer reaches of the Solar System.

Consequently, its velocity, even near perihelion, is not that high, and matching orbits with it is, while not trivial, not hopelessly hard either. That said, Rosetta did spend 10 years in space and needed multiple gravity assist maneuvers in order to finally rendezvous with the comet. Still, the circuitous route was more about fuel economy than any fundamental difficulty with reaching its destination.

[mml]

The lander is in the comet's frame of reference. To it, the comet is stationary, and the universe is whipping around them. The same way you perceive yourself to be stationary on the earth, despite earth orbiting the sun at 67 thousand miles an hour.

[soneca]

They made Rosetta also moves so fast. "Violent" here is an exageration, as at the vacuum (or near-vacuum), if both objects are moving in the same direction and speed, relatively to each other they are very close to still... and calm.

[lmm]

A comet is still in a solar orbit (admittedly an eccentric one); matching velocity with it is still possible, if you need to go faster that just means using a few more gravitational assists on the way there.

Matching the rotation of the comet is harder, but again it's just a rotation - the comet is not in a position where it's outgassing, so it'll be rotating about some axis with some angular velocity. Once once you're orbiting the comet you can take your time, or even just schedule the descent for a time when things happen to line up. They planned this one a few days ago AIUI.

[outworlder]

This is both a witty and serious comment(and also, late): go play Kerbal Space Program.

You'll develop an intuitive grasp of this kind of thing.

[makeusz]

In the meantime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H08tGjXNHO4 (Ambition the film)

[franzb]

Am I the only one noticing, and wondering, why the operations center is nearly empty? Lunch time?

[mkempe]

The Europeans don't pretend that "mission control" actually controls the current, live sequence of events?

[grey-area]

The descent is long, unpowered, unguided, and 30 minutes away in time - if something goes wrong, all they will be able to do is watch, in fact not even that, because there is no data from the lander yet.

They're not expecting any data till 1400 or so, and then they'll gradually get some descent data back, but whatever happens, they won't be able to affect the outcome of the descent now. Before the data comes in was probably a good time to get some rest/food.

[tinkerdol]

My guess would be they are getting rest now before the flurry of activity and long hours starting soon.

[Blahah]

HAL has everything under control.

[tempodox]

Yes! This is the kind of news for HN :) We should have something like this every month or so.

[hughes]

The live chat in ##cometlanding on irc.freenode.net is pretty good.

[welshguy]

It's down. Harpoons fired. Telemetry active.

[louhike]

Unfortunatly, the harpoons did not. But the lander seems ok. The mission control is trying to find a way to fire the harpoons.

[flexie]

Landed!!! Awesome :-)

[fabriceleal]

Ah, the pictures here https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/sets/72157... remind me of Eraserhead :)

[edgartheunready]

Must be watched while listening to this on repeat: https://soundcloud.com/fauzkhan/hanszimmerinterstellardayone...

[edgartheunready]

Must be watched with this on repeat: https://soundcloud.com/fauzkhan/hanszimmerinterstellardayone...

[car]

The DLR telemetry page, for the technical inclined: http://www.musc.dlr.de/philae/telemetrie.html

[Icybee]

Is it just me, or does it keep buffering for anyone else?

[superkuh]

On some linux configurations flash 11.x doesn't seem to work with livestream. A handful of seconds play then it permanently buffers. One solution is to use the python program livestreamer (http://livestreamer.tanuki.se/en/latest/index.html) to play the stream in vlc.

[kecebongsoft]

It's really smooth here in Malaysia.

[aerique]

It kept buffering for me in Firefox but worked fine in Chrome.

[seszett]

Works fine in 720p here (France).

[donmb]

Does anyone know where exactly Tschuri is right now in our solar system? Couldn't find any map or sth that illustrates that.

[nsxwolf]

Is there actual video of the landing? I'm still just seeing talking heads on the live stream. Did I miss it?

[imdsm]

I don't believe so, not so far anyway, that'd be a technical feat itself.