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.
I just worded it that way to point out they both have instruments on it. Sounded like what was important to point out. But yes, NASA has a couple instruments among the many ESA has on it, on an ESA mission.
4. A sizable colony on Mars . I got the idea for this commentary from the space section of the wildly popular Reddit web-site. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posed the question of what could be achieved if all the money spent on wars was instead given to NASA. The resulting exchange was pretty fanciful, but one of the options mentioned might make sense — building a colony on Mars. Mars is the only other truly Earth-like planet in the known universe, it has water and it is reachable. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has claimed that a colony of 80,000 could be established for $36 billion. He tends to hyperbole, so let’s say he is off by an order of magnitude (1000%). We could still create a sizable colony for a fraction of what was spent in Iraq, providing a sanctuary from Earth’s next asteroid hit.
Or using the money that was used to bail out the banks. Just today, I read that Austria spent 19 billion EUR on bailing out Hypo Alpe Adria bank. Use that, and the WhatsApp money, and you have a Mars colony :)
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!
>I'll definitely keep both windows open, but it sure seems like the ESA site might be quicker on updates for live events!
This is so hilarious. For up to the minute information, it's a toss-up between the European Space Agency's live stream on the probe it's landing on a comet, and... a hand-drawn web comic about it.
ESA's PR is not very good. They have mostly talking heads while Randall Munroe actually provides a good overview on what's happening now and what's going to happen next.
When humanity landed on Titan (which is a mind boggling achievement), the pictures couldn't be shown right away because they had to have some politician talking some platitudes first.
The absurdity of that statement became clear to me almost immediately after I typed it.. but then again, the XKCD updates ended up occurring exactly on schedule so maybe it wasn't so absurd after all!
I know that website is a useful tool in itself, but when I learned this is what Mark Karpeles is up to now, I felt bitter. I guess I still am not over the fact his company stole a non-trivial sum of my money.
Please don't take it as a slur against this harmless site. It just... surprised me.
It really brings special relativity home to think that the ESA's counter is only valid from the reference frames we usually use. It's only when Randall's counter reaches zero that we can unambiguously say that the probe landed in the past.
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.
Some scientists believe the it might be the pressure sensors that have failed instead of the cold gas system itself. It's not an unanimous opinion though. Well, we'll see.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
What I would like to know is how did ESA calculate the trajectory that Rosetta needed to take to meet up with the planets for the purpose of gravity-assist maneuvers? I mean this was a 10 year journey, is there any way to make corrections to the trajectory? How much room for error is there?
With smart minds, Newtonian mechanics, numerical methods, and some computer time. The path was complex, mut not much moreso than eg. MESSENGER's seven-year journey to Mercury. Space probes usually do a couple of course corrections burns en route, but the margin of error is pretty small. Fortunately, orbital mechanics is highly predictable at human time scales even though n-body systems are quite chaotic in the long term. If the launch vehicle puts you straight on the calculated trajectory you can be pretty damn sure you'll be on the right path even ten years from now.
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.
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.
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.
I'm European myself. I understand that the one-hour roundtrip doesn't quite allow for quick interventions, still I would expect operations people to be there "just in case", or at least to monitor the (I presume) continuous down stream... I find that there's a striking lack of activity in that room :)
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.
I know, even though they said they had fired and the cable had rewound, to draw the lander in closer. They've shut down media and comms until tomorrow at this point. I'm getting a bit worried now.
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.
They've only sent back two images so far, I think we can assume that the bandwidth of the signal is very low, at that distance. At the moment it's better to use it for sending data than pictures. Perhaps they will have stored something like that locally, and can transmit them later.
But you then have to have the capability of taking pictures at a decent frame rate, and the capability and bandwidth to store and forward those images to earth, which these 2 spacecrafts do not have.
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.