You know I have some bad days some times, but seeing shit like this just makes me think "What a fucking time to be alive!" It's truly incredibly and is sometimes that kick in the pants I need to keep on going. We are living in a golden age of humanity right now, at no point before in human history have so many people had such an incredible quality of life and never before has man been doing such incredible feats and have the ability to reach a worldwide audience almost instantaneously. The fact that just a few hours ago a human designed space craft landed on a comet, after decades of work and I can receive the images fresh from the great minds that brought us this feat, while laying in bed dicking about on my phone, it's just pure and simply astounding.
For all our flaws I love humans and I am so excited to see what the future holds.
Back to the comet, any word on what happened to the harpoons? I heard there was a misfire or they didn't fire or something? Any idea how that's affected the landing as of yet?
I'm not sure about that status of the harpoons, but I generally use http://reddit.com/r/space to keep up with all of my space related news. Article quality is generally very high and there are a lot nice folks over there who answer questions in the comments.
Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend.
"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth."
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell.
Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.
Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.
All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially, ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.
My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )
"Got fresh news from the team, they are broadcasting live right now on french TV ! Philae landed, and bounced slowly for (1-2-? hours), and travelled 1km away the targetted site. Yes 1000m. Then know this because of the datas from the radar. It's now stopped slanted, some cams are shooting the sky, other the ground, and other nearby rocks, as seen on the first photo. It's inside some kind of cave/hole, not much sun for the solar panels.
EDIT1: It landed on the core of the comet, it sees the light from the sun for about 1 to 2 hours per day. In the next days/week the angle of the comet will change/sun, and it very likely the solar panel will get more sunlight so more power for the probe.
EDIT2 : Many labs are performing right now and performed the whole night. For now they put the drilling on hold since they don't know if it's tied to the ground or not. Drilling op was also power hungry so it's kinda a good thing it's on hold since there's not much sun available for the panels. Battery life been re-estimated to 50-55hours due to the lack of sunlight. This time includes the 7 hours of descent.They are constantly adjusting missions goals, depending on conditions, power available, etc,
EDIT3 : The probe has been working to gather scientifict datas the whole time, including during the bounces. There's already a large amount of datas available, whatever happens next.
EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in, it's not burried into soft soil.
EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can communicate with the orbiter, but that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's already a lot of datas transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact between the orbiter and the probe can be approximately done twice per day.
EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned, flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there.
EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at 5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the datas from the first batch of tests."
The sunlight appears to be coming from behind and to the left of Philae in this picture, at a fairly low angle, so the back of it should (I hope) be reasonably illuminated at the moment.
It's definitely not clear from this picture which way is "up". It looks to me like up may be towards the top right of the picture, in which case Philae may be at a 45 degree angle. But I'm probably wrong - the full panorama should tell all.
Also very interesting, if you look at the high-res picture and zoom at the bottom right, you'll notice some sort of cable on the ground/boulder.
This could be the cable from one of the harpoons that may have fired but didn't anchor themselves, or it could be a feature attached to Philae that's in the field of vision.
The sheen coming from the surface where light hits is indicative of some interesting materials on that comet. Looking forward to more photos and especially analysis of the surface composition!
Looks like a pretty rough place to land - I wonder though if this is one of the 'bounce' phases of the landing, and maybe what ended up happening was that it was more of a tumble, due to surface features snagging a leg, or something.. I must admit that during the approach, the landing site looked to me like it might have been 'pretty smooth', like it was a plane of material that didn't look too jagged and nasty, but this photo just looks like we landed in a pretty rough spot. Regardless, seems like some science is going to get done anyway, and that sure is exciting! Can't wait for 14:00 and see some new pics ..
The pictures taken by Rosetta are BW. From [0]:
"Some light contrast enhancements have been made to emphasise certain features and to bring out features in the shadowed areas. In reality, the comet is extremely dark -– blacker than coal. The images, taken in black-and-white, are grey-scaled according to the relative brightness of the features observed, which depends on local illumination conditions, surface characteristics and composition of the given area. Some slight vignetting can also be seen in the corners of some images." So possibly Philae has a similar system.
[0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/1573996637...
Possibly stupid question: why are all the images greyscale? Could we not send a color camera? Or is the comet very grey? Or does color not work in space?
The comet is in fact very very black, but pretty much all cameras are greyscale. Most 'colour' cameras are just a series of filters placed over the pixels to sense only light of the desired colour (usually RGB)
When science has to be done, it's easier to have a selectable set of filters you can put in front of the whole sensor at once. This way you can use the full sensor resolution and you can have a wider variety of filters. They also tend to bring along spectrometers of some description which are again much much more useful.
I know that sometimes, images are first sent in black and white to save on data, color is sent later.
Hubble apparently only does black and white. color images can be obtained using a technique involving two of its black and white images. But that is a telescope, probably not similar.
Space probe NEAR-Shoemaker landed on asteroid Eros in 2001!
What is amazing about this landing is that the probe had no landing gear, no shock absorbers, and was not designed in any way to land. NASA engineers tuned the orbit carefully and slowly and we're able to match velocities for a soft landing for what was otherwise supposed to be an orbiting spacecraft.
It almost seems like "landing" is too strong a word: Philae has a mass of 100kg and the gravity of Churyumov–Gerasimenko is estimated to be 10e−3 m/s2, which comes out to a weight of 3.5 ounces, or the equivalent of 100 grams on earth. Let's hope it holds!
10e-3 m/s^2 is hard to believe, as the lander would have to be ~250m away from the center of mass [1]. More likely it is 2500m away from the center of mass, giving 6.67e-11 * 1.0e13 / 2500 ^ 2 = 0.0001 m/s^2, so about 1 gram.
Thanks to the sorta dumbbell shape, depending on where Philae landed the apparent gravity may be a LOT less, should a considerable amount of the comet's mass be "above" the lander. (Think "what's the pull of gravity in the center of a planet?")
Lrigikithumer|11 years ago
For all our flaws I love humans and I am so excited to see what the future holds.
Back to the comet, any word on what happened to the harpoons? I heard there was a misfire or they didn't fire or something? Any idea how that's affected the landing as of yet?
weavie|11 years ago
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/Comet_over_L...
I had no idea the thing was so small. To get something to intercept an object that size traveling at 1000's mph is an amazing feat!
vital101|11 years ago
kissickas|11 years ago
mapimopi|11 years ago
badname|11 years ago
"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell.
Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.
Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.
All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially, ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.
My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )
gokhan|11 years ago
"Got fresh news from the team, they are broadcasting live right now on french TV ! Philae landed, and bounced slowly for (1-2-? hours), and travelled 1km away the targetted site. Yes 1000m. Then know this because of the datas from the radar. It's now stopped slanted, some cams are shooting the sky, other the ground, and other nearby rocks, as seen on the first photo. It's inside some kind of cave/hole, not much sun for the solar panels.
EDIT1: It landed on the core of the comet, it sees the light from the sun for about 1 to 2 hours per day. In the next days/week the angle of the comet will change/sun, and it very likely the solar panel will get more sunlight so more power for the probe.
EDIT2 : Many labs are performing right now and performed the whole night. For now they put the drilling on hold since they don't know if it's tied to the ground or not. Drilling op was also power hungry so it's kinda a good thing it's on hold since there's not much sun available for the panels. Battery life been re-estimated to 50-55hours due to the lack of sunlight. This time includes the 7 hours of descent.They are constantly adjusting missions goals, depending on conditions, power available, etc,
EDIT3 : The probe has been working to gather scientifict datas the whole time, including during the bounces. There's already a large amount of datas available, whatever happens next.
EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in, it's not burried into soft soil.
EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can communicate with the orbiter, but that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's already a lot of datas transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact between the orbiter and the probe can be approximately done twice per day.
EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned, flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there.
EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at 5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the datas from the first batch of tests."
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2m63hd/first_civa_ima...
valevk|11 years ago
Wow, I think this is great luck, that the probe is still on the comet, and even seems to work properly.
nitrogen|11 years ago
netcan|11 years ago
jbogp|11 years ago
Also the large amount of shadow in the area is worrisome for the solar panels to function properly.
Press conference with the release of a full panorama (which will hopefully not confirm the side landing) is scheduled for 1400 CET.
mhandley|11 years ago
It's definitely not clear from this picture which way is "up". It looks to me like up may be towards the top right of the picture, in which case Philae may be at a 45 degree angle. But I'm probably wrong - the full panorama should tell all.
jbogp|11 years ago
This could be the cable from one of the harpoons that may have fired but didn't anchor themselves, or it could be a feature attached to Philae that's in the field of vision.
andrewd18|11 years ago
Luc|11 years ago
binarymax|11 years ago
fit2rule|11 years ago
muyuu|11 years ago
Zeebrommer|11 years ago
wlievens|11 years ago
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=PHILA...
I would guess these are probably not a Bayer filter pattern, but filters that are mechanically swapped.
lentil_soup|11 years ago
jbogp|11 years ago
unknown|11 years ago
[deleted]
jamesfisher|11 years ago
hahainternet|11 years ago
When science has to be done, it's easier to have a selectable set of filters you can put in front of the whole sensor at once. This way you can use the full sensor resolution and you can have a wider variety of filters. They also tend to bring along spectrometers of some description which are again much much more useful.
NeverEnough|11 years ago
I know that sometimes, images are first sent in black and white to save on data, color is sent later.
Hubble apparently only does black and white. color images can be obtained using a technique involving two of its black and white images. But that is a telescope, probably not similar.
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of...
the comet could just be grey, not sure about that one.
rurban|11 years ago
Lambdanaut|11 years ago
Comet 67P seems a lot more rugged than previous comets we've been to.
IndianAstronaut|11 years ago
Absolutely amazing.
jeffwass|11 years ago
What is amazing about this landing is that the probe had no landing gear, no shock absorbers, and was not designed in any way to land. NASA engineers tuned the orbit carefully and slowly and we're able to match velocities for a soft landing for what was otherwise supposed to be an orbiting spacecraft.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEAR_Shoemaker
(Edit - fixed asteroid name)
avian|11 years ago
zachrose|11 years ago
stromgo|11 years ago
[1] I can't find a reliable estimate of the surface gravity online, but the mass estimate at http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/21/determining-the-mass... seems accurate.
ctdonath|11 years ago
unknown|11 years ago
[deleted]
TomGullen|11 years ago
sp332|11 years ago
flinty|11 years ago
netcan|11 years ago
My reaction to this photo is a little funny. Basically: "Rocks! We have rocks too! Yours look a lot like ours."
I have this desire to find things in common. Like flirting.
afoot|11 years ago
lostInComm|11 years ago
What is a "CIVA Image"? Everyone is using the term - but not explaining what it is!
dennismp|11 years ago
harisamin|11 years ago
netcan|11 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|11 years ago
[deleted]