Space In General

DQuaN
No love for Rosetta and Philae in this thread?
The little guy is gonna make his landing tomorrow morning.
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Great love for Rosetta and Philae. :cool::cheers:

The landing will be almost ridiculously difficult, far harder than originally imagined or planned for. Even so, I wish them great luck and hope for the best.

Comets are very poorly understood. The media still have a fondness for referring to them as "dirty snowballs", even after it appears "rocky dumbbells" would be a more apt description.
 
Touring Mars
Live coverage of the landing (attempt) on BBC News for people in the UK...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/science-environment-29985988

Apparently the landing is scheduled for about 1600 GMT, so there's a while to go yet... however the lander has been deployed.
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I wish them all the luck in the world. They will need it.

Not only has the crucial "down" thruster failed, the craft is equipped with only a harpoon and ice screws to attach itself to the surface. When the craft was designed back in the 90's, it was thought comets were "dirty snowballs", so such equipment was thought adequate. Since this comet now seems more like a rocky body, pitons and jam nuts might have been the better choice!
 
Fingers crossed...

It wouldn't be the end of the world if the landing fails - they will still have learned a great deal from the procedures today and Rosetta will remain with the comet for some time too, but it would obviously be a huge disappointment if it fails to land... the possible consequences of a successful landing, however, are immense. Fortunately, I have a quiet day at work today, and the boss is away - although the boss would thoroughly approve of us taking time out to follow this, so I'm going to classify it as working :P
 
They should stop talking and show us the live feed from the space craft. :P

40 minutes from first opportunity to land.

uud0pg7de7mjgvmymdrb.jpg


The lander on its way to the space rock.
 
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Well, it is invading private property. :lol:

They will, when the mission is over, try to get the mothership also on the rock, so that it and the lander will be together forever.

Aaaaaaw.
 
We're nearly there. Live stream is now showing the control center.

Sjeez. This nerd is about to burst out of his bubble!

Smiling faces are appearing in the control center. That must be a good sign.
 
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Now some concerned looks? I don't have sound so I'm going off their facial expressions!
 
It's great to see all those people so happy! Scientists are really like kids! Go amazing and so humble at the same time.
 
Some tweets are suggesting that the anchors have not deployed yet or have not been successfully deployed... different sources have said that the probe is 'moving' and is not anchored properly...
 
Mark McCaughrean, Esa's senior science adviser, has confirmed the lander's screws - if not its harpoons - have dug into the comet's surface.
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Not as bad as first thought then.
 
There was a problem with the thrusters on top of the lander. They couldn't get a signal so they were worried that the craft will just bounce off because the thrusters aren't there to push it into the rock.

I was told live coverage by 11 PM tonight. I guess I missed it?
 
From New Horizons:

neptune-triton-lorri-7-10-14-labels_1.jpg


NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft captured this view of the giant planet Neptune and its large moon Triton on July 10, 2014, from a distance of about 2.45 billion miles (3.96 billion kilometers) - more than 26 times the distance between the Earth and sun. The 967-millisecond exposure was taken with the New Horizons telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI).

New Horizons traverses the orbit of Neptune on Aug. 25, 2014 – its last planetary orbit crossing before beginning an encounter with Pluto in January 2015. In fact, at the time of the orbit crossing, New Horizons was much closer to its target planet – just about 273 million miles (or 440 million kilometers) – than to Neptune.
 
Welcome_to_a_comet_node_full_image_2.jpg


First image from the surface - one of the lander's feet can be seen in the image...

New Scientist are reporting that the drilling experiment scheduled for today has been cancelled because the lander is not stable, although there are conflicting reports about the 'stability', but I suppose it depends on what they mean by 'stable'...
 
Yep. ^^ I was just imagining the probe floting 1Km away from a 4Km rock and then going back down. ^^
 

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