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Comets

Signs and Portents - it's the end of the world, I tell 'ee!

Comet Siding Spring set to whizz close to Mars
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

Scientists should get a grandstand view of a comet on Sunday when it makes a dramatic flyby of Mars.
The icy object, known as Siding Spring, will miss the Red Planet by what is - in astronomical terms - just a hair's breadth, or 139,500km (87,000 miles).
Satellites round Mars and rovers on its surface hope to capture the event on their cameras and instruments.

But the orbiters in particular have been commanded to do so from a safe vantage point.
Fast-moving dust ejected from the comet poses a small but tangible risk to the probes.
The space agencies of America, Europe and India have therefore shifted the satellites so that they will be on the far side of the planet when moving past Siding Spring's debris field.
This is likely to occur about 90 minutes after the comet has made its closest approach to Mars at 18:27 GMT (19:27 BST; 14:27 EDT).

Scientists are excited because it is really their first opportunity to study up-close one of the true outlier comets of the Solar System.
Siding Spring, also known as C/2013 A1, comes from what researchers call the Oort Cloud - a huge spherical region of space far beyond the planets and part-way to the nearest stars.
As such, the comet is experiencing the warmth of the Sun for the first time, and that means it is very little altered from the time of its formation more than 4.5 billion years ago.
Its pristine condition should provide insights on the materials that went into building the Solar System.

"Siding Spring probably got knocked into the inner Solar System by the passage of a star near the Oort Cloud," explained Carey Lisse, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, US.
"So think about a comet that started to travel probably at the dawn of man and it's just now coming in. And the reason we can actually observe it is because we've built satellites and rovers and we've now got these outposts at Mars. That's pretty exciting." 8)

The icy core, or nucleus, of the comet is only about one km across, but the American space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will try to picture it and resolve its shape - something that has never been done before for an Oort Cloud visitor.
The other satellites will study its gas and dust shroud, known as the coma, and the material trailing away from it - its tail.
Specifically, they will examine any interactions with the Martian atmosphere.
This is likely to heat up very slightly as material from the comet falls on it. Instruments should also detect some transient chemical changes, perhaps even some circulation changes.

The Curiosity and Opportunity rovers will try to picture Siding Spring in the sky from their surface locations.
This will be challenging, but they may well pick up shooting stars as cometary dust grains shoot through the upper atmosphere and burn up.

"The Mars flyby is exciting since we have so many different instruments on so many different spacecraft working together," said Dr Dan Brown, an astronomer at Nottingham Trent University, UK.
"Not one of these was initially designed for such a project, yet the science teams behind them were able to adapt and set up observations that should give us an in depth view into comets, the matter they are made out of and ultimately what made our Solar System.
"In my opinion this shows how science is sometimes driven by chance encounters and relies on flexibility and creativity of the teams supporting them."

Siding Spring is approaching Mars on a steep angle from south of the ecliptic - the plane on which the planets and other inner Solar System objects sit.
This is one reason scientists know it to be an Oort visitor. Another telltale is its velocity at more than 50km per second.
And that velocity, says University of Maryland's Jessica Sunshine, is a reminder of why we should be vigilant for these types of comet, which tend to announce themselves with only a few months' warning (C/2013 A1 was first seen in January 2013).

The energy they would impart were they to strike our planet would be immense.
"People remember the Chelyabinsk asteroid that hit at maybe 15km per second. This comet is going almost four times that and would be altogether more impressive," Prof Sunshine told the BBC.

"We're getting better at finding these Oort Cloud visitors further out because our telescopes and automatic surveys are getting very good at picking up objects moving across the sky.
"But if this thing were coming to Earth, we'd have a problem because with only a few months' warning, you couldn't really do anything about it."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29665247

I think I'm in love with Jessica Sunshine! :D
 
Rosetta comet mission: Landing site named 'Agilkia'
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

The landing site on a comet to be targeted by Europe's Philae robot on 12 November has been named "Agilkia" following a public competition.
It continues the Egyptian theme for the mission - being an island in the Nile.
Philae will be ejected towards Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by its carrier spacecraft, Rosetta, on the morning of 12 November.
If successful, it will be a historic first - no probe has ever soft-landed on one of these icy bodies before.
Controllers at the European Space Agency's operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany, hope to get a positive signal from the robot at just after 1600 GMT (1700 CET).

Until now, the chosen landing zone on the "head" of duck-shaped 67P has been known simply as "J" - a reference to its position on a list of possible destinations in the landing site selection process.
The new name - Agilkia - refers to a patch of high ground in the Nile River south of Egypt.
It is the place where ancient Egyptian buildings, including the famous Temple of Isis, were moved when their previous home, the island of Philae, was flooded during the building of the Aswan dams last century.

Philae also refers to the obelisk taken from the drowned island which, along with the Rosetta Stone, was used to crack the meaning of ancient hieroglyphs.

One hundred and fifty people suggested the name Agilkia in the competition, with a committee nominating Alexandre Brouste from France as the overall winner.
Everyone who entered had to write an accompanying short essay, and his impressed the judges most.
Mr Brouste will now be invited to Darmstadt's "mission control" to follow the landing event in person. 8)

Rosetta will be some 580 million km from Earth when it drops the piggybacked Philae over the comet.
The descent is expected to take about seven hours.
If the robot manages to latch on to the surface with screws and harpoons, it will begin a series of experiments to analyse the composition and structure of 67P.
Its data, along with pictures, will be beamed up to Rosetta for onward transmission to Earth.

Scientists believe comets to contain pristine materials left over from the formation of the Solar System more than 4.5 billion years ago.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29902456
 
The Singing Comet

Yahoo news reports that there are strange clicking signals coming from the Rosetta comet.

A lot of perfectly natural things emit radio waves-and this report comes from some rag called 'The Examiner' so I'm not buying-not yet.

Some photos have been hyped as showing an antenna and a spacecraft. Still no sale. Sameo-sameo reports of extraterrestrial fossils and microbes on the Space Station.

Or could this be a run up to the Great Reveal? A dying NASA scientist tells us there are actually ETs on Earth? A sudden increase in UFO sightings?

I'm a skeptic, but could it be?
 
Rosetta mission: 'Go' is given for comet landing
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, Darmstadt

The European Space Agency has given the final "go" for its audacious landing attempt on a comet. :D
At 08:35 GMT, Esa's Rosetta satellite will release the Philae lander on a seven-hour descent to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The flight team, based in Darmstadt, Germany, has confirmed that Rosetta is lined up correctly.
If Philae gets down successfully, it will be the first time that a robot has landed on the surface of a comet.
Confirmation is expected at Earth around 1600 GMT.

If all goes to plan, the little robot, called Philae, will deploy screws and harpoons to secure its position on the comet after a seven-hour flight.
The first thing Philae will do on landing is send back a picture of its surroundings - a strange landscape containing deep pits and tall ice spires.
This is, though, an event with a highly uncertain outcome.

Early on Wednesday (GMT), the third "go" signal was delayed due to concerns over the health of the Philae lander.
"We almost didn't get the third 'go'," said Paolo Ferri, head of operations at Esa.

The thruster system used to push the robot into the surface of the comet when it touches down could not be primed. This means Philae will now have nothing to push it into the surface of the comet.
"We will just have to rely now on the harpoons, the screws in the feet, or the softness of the surface. It doesn't make it any easier, that's for sure," said lander chief Stephan Ulamec, from the German Space Agency. But the landing attempt goes ahead.

The terrain that has been chosen for the landing on the rubber duck-shaped object is far from flat.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30012854
 
I'm watching the preparation for the descent live here: http://rosetta.esa.int/

They've given a summary of the process over the last few days to bring us up to speed, and are now interviewing three of the team principal scientists. Its very exciting.
 
Probe makes historic comet landing

European robot probe Philae has made the first, historic landing on a comet, after descending from its mothership.
The landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was confirmed at about 1605 GMT.
There were cheers and hugs at the control room in Darmstadt, Germany, after the signal was confirmed. :D

It was designed to shine a light on some of the mysteries of these icy relics from the formation of the Solar System.
The landing caps a 6.4 billion-kilometre journey that was begun a decade ago.

The lander sank about 4cm into the surface, suggesting a relatively soft surface.
But there remains some lack of clarity over whether the harpoons designed to fasten the spacecraft to the ball of ice and dust fired as intended.
"This is a big step for human civilisation," said Jean-Jacques Dordain, the director-general of the European Space Agency (Esa).

Shortly after the touchdown was confirmed, Stephan Ulamec, the mission's lander chief, said: "Philae is talking to us... we are on the comet."
The first pictures from the surface have already reached Earth and are being processed in preparation for release.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield, famous for performing David Bowie's Space Oddity on the space station, said of the comet: "Now we're close enough to lick it, and see what it's really made of."

Prof Monica Grady of the Open University, who has worked on the project from its earliest days, was at mission control in Darmstadt and was jumping for joy when the news came through.
She told BBC News: "I can't believe it, it's fantastic, we've landed - we've waited so long for this."

Scientists initially said Philae's harpoons did not fire as intended, but BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos said this remained unclear.
If they did not deploy, then scientists will take a decision on whether to re-fire them.
However, sources said that screws in the feet that are also designed to anchor the robot into the soil did work.
Earlier, a thruster system designed to push the robot down into the surface of the comet failed.

Part of the difficulty is the very low gravity on the 4km-wide ice mountain.
Philae needs to be wary of simply bouncing back into space.
The nature and strength of the materials on the surface are unknown.
Philae could have alighted upon terrain whose constitution is anything between rock hard and puff-powder soft.

Controllers in Darmstadt have already received pictures from the surface of the comet, but are getting intermittent drop-out in the lander's signal.

Analysis by Science editor David Shukman

Landing on the small strange world of a comet ranks as one of the greatest achievements in space exploration. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would obviously take pride of place.

People might debate the relative prowess of robotic rovers driving on Mars or the Voyager spacecraft edging out of the solar system.

But touching down on a primordial lump of rock and ice that dates from the earliest days of the Solar System - and which is hurtling through space at 34,000 mph - is a genuine triumph by any standards.

Dreaming up the plan 25 years ago, enduring 10 years of journeying through space, handling the tension of edging close to the comet more than 300 million miles away - all these are remarkable in their own right.

Rosetta's orbits around the comet are generating unexpected insights. But landing will help achieve a dream of establishing invaluable ground truth about a body that previous generations could only gawp at in wonder or terror.

etc, etc... 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30026398
 
And for a Fortean angle, the comet is singing to us (or to someone...)

The sound coming from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has caught the imagination of hundreds of thousands on social media.

"Maybe it's the sound of an alien shouting 'help me, I'm trapped inside a comet'," Alan Hayward commented on SoundCloud, the audio sharing network. This was where the European Space Agency posted the audio of the sound being captured by their Rosetta spacecraft, from which the probe to land on the comet is being deployed. "Is that you, Predator?" asked another user, Reactor Four. Another, Ronnie Wonders said: "This is wonderful. It would be arrogant to think we are alone in this universe. Not saying it's aliens but I'm really looking forward to finding out what is making this sound."

[Audio file: Rosetta singing]

For their part, the scientists are just as surprised as social media users. "This is exciting because it is completely new to us. We did not expect this and we are still working to understand the physics of what is happening," Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, explained on the RESA Rosetta blog. The "song" - as the scientists themselves refer to it- was in fact outside the normal range of human hearing range and has to be boosted in volume by a factor of 10,000. According to scientific theory, the comet releases neutral particles into space where they collide with high-energy particles and that's what makes the sound. However, "the precise physical mechanism behind the oscillations remains a mystery," according to the blog.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-30023776

Whoever holds the copyright to that tune will make a fortune! ;)
 
First pic from the comet...
B2QQCvaCYAEAOpM.jpg


;)
 
That sound or signal is very odd.
And the comet...it's just how I'd imagine a spaceship would look after it's flown around the galaxy for 4 billion years... :shock:
 
The harpoons and thruster that should have secured it to the comet both failed, so it is relying on its weight to hold it down; this is about 15 grams, if my calculations are correct ( on the 'head' of the 'duck' it might be even less).

It will be really tricky to take any samples if it isn't anchored, and it may be upside-down or at any angle. Communications are really poor. Still, we'll see what happens tomorrow, eh?
 
eburacum said:
It will be really tricky to take any samples if it isn't anchored, and it may be upside-down or at any angle. Communications are really poor. Still, we'll see what happens tomorrow, eh?
Are they planning to take physical samples? Doesn't seem likely, as the probe's not returning. I thought they were using remote sensing for analysis.

As you say, we'll see...
 
eburacum said:
It has a gas cromatograph; how do you use that without taking samples?
Well, fair enough! But I used a gas chromatograph in the Sahara in the 60s. And the samples it took were gas fom the upcoming well mud, which was easily 'sniffed'!

What did the probe sample?
 
Well, a comet is a ball of volatiles and dirt, a dirty snowball; perhaps it vapourises part of the surface and sniffs it. That would probably need some sort of contact or the volatiles will just gas away.

They will be looking for deuterium - the isotope ratio can indicate where the comet formed; if it formed out past Neptune the D2O content will be double) and they might be looking for organics too.
 
https://twitter.com/philae_romap/status ... 0787896320
Magnetic field analysis revealed 3 landings at 15:33, 17:26 and 17:33 UTC

It bounced twice in two hours. Ouch! This environment is nothing like anything we are familiar with. Can you even imagine a spaceship a metre across that weighs fifteen grams, and bounces that take two hours to complete?
 
Some insider info from someone working on the harpoon experiment;
After long discussions the current status is that we had in fact three landings on a comet. At first touch down both the AOCS thruster and the anchors were not activated for reasons yet not fully understood. Philae bounced two more times. The first bounce took two hours and was possibly up to one kilometre. The second bounce was then only 20m. Since then the Lander appears to be stable and upright on the the surface. FSS is commencing nominal and next radio link is expected for about 7:30 CET. If radio contact is established we are back on the mission track. No deployment though until situation is clear. All instruments are working and we received data until end of radio link. All active instruments concur with the bouncing and a rotation of the lander during the first bounce in fact spin stabilising the Lander.
source
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread. ... a-is-There!
 
The anchor mechanisms are not engaging because of the near zero gravity. It attempted to drill in but could get no purchase and merely relaunched the craft upwards.

No downward thrust then? Surely the boffins anticipated this scenario. Perhaps they were hoping for a slushy exterior.
 
skinny said:
No downward thrust then? Surely the boffins anticipated this scenario. Perhaps they were hoping for a slushy exterior.
They anticipated almost anything. But after such a long trip, not everything worked.

Eburacum (above): "The harpoons and thruster that should have secured it to the comet both failed, so it is relying on its weight to hold it down"
 
Rosetta: Comet probe Philae now stable - scientists

The robot probe Philae that made a historic comet landing is now stable after initially failing to attach to the surface, the BBC has learnt.
Pictures are coming back from the craft as scientists debate how to proceed.

European Space Agency engineers working on the lander say it may have bounced hundreds of metres back up off the surface after first touching down. :shock:

Scientists hope the probe will analyse the comet's surface to yield insights into the origins of our Solar System.

The Esa's Rosetta satellite carried Philae on a 6.4 billion-km (4bn-mile) journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The robot probe, the size of a washing machine, was launched from the satellite on Wednesday and spent seven hours travelling to the comet.

News of the first landing was confirmed at about 16:05 GMT on Wednesday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30034060
 
What the papers say:

'Rock and awe'

Much excitement is generated by the touchdown of a landing craft on the comet 67P, with the Mirror declaring it a "rock star" and the Sun describing the event as "rock & awe".

Summing up the atmosphere at the European Space Agency's mission control in Germany when the Rosetta mission's Philae lander made contact, the Guardian's Ian Sample writes: "The signal broke a seven-hour wait of agonising intensity and sparked scenes of jubilation."

Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton declares it "the moment when science fiction became science fact", before noting that initial jubilation was followed by anxiety when it emerged the craft had not anchored in place as planned. Meanwhile, the paper's editorial column notes the mission "was replete with modern touches - such as a stilted 'conversation' between Philae and its parent craft, Rosetta, on Twitter".

Saying the mission was powered by a desire to understand how life on Earth began, the Independent adds that after Wednesday afternoon's landing "Humankind is one step and 300 million miles closer to an answer."

"The expertise needed to do this is staggering," says the Daily Express. "Let's hope the mission turns out to be the success we all want." For the Sun, it is a "colossal achievement up there with the Moon landings and Mars missions". And, it points out: "Brits did it."

One of the British scientists involved is pictured in several papers, with the Times profiling Matt Taylor who, it says, "has come to embody the attitude of swagger that runs to the heart of the Rosetta mission". Pictured in a loud shirt and with an intricate Philae tattoo, Mr Taylor is described as having grown up in east London where he worked for his father's bricklaying firm. "My dad encouraged me to go to university so I didn't have to get up at five or six in the morning," he's quoted as saying. 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-30032114
 
Rosetta: concern over comet lander batteries

The robot probe Philae that made a historic comet landing is now stable after initially failing to attach to the surface, and is sending pictures.
After two bounces, the first one about 1km back out into space, the lander settled in the shadow of a cliff, 1km from its target site.
It may be problematic to get enough sunlight to charge its batteries.

Launched in 2004, the European Space Agency (Esa) mission hopes to learn about the origins of our Solar System.
It has already sent back the first images ever taken on the surface of a comet.

After showing an image that indicates Philae's location - on the far side of a large crater that was considered but rejected as a landing site - the head of the lander team Stefan Ulamec said: "We could be somewhere in the rim of this crater, which could explain this bizarre… orientation that you have seen."
Figuring out the orientation and location is a difficult task, he said.
"I can't really give you much more than you interpret yourself from looking at these beautiful images."

But the team is continuing to receive "great data" from several different instruments on board Philae.

Esa's Rosetta satellite carried Philae on a 6.4 billion-km (4bn-mile) journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30034060
 
[Same URL]

David Shukman, BBC science editor

Touching down on a comet is mind-blowing in itself, but try picturing how the tiny Philae lander has then bounced around its new home.
From what we know, the lander rose hundreds of metres above the surface at one stage and remained in flight for nearly two hours. One might say it was airborne, except that the comet has no air.

In any event, it may have risen vertically or drifted sideways - we should hear later. Either way, while Philae was off the surface, the comet will have rotated beneath it. Each rotation takes about 12 hours which means the lander may effectively travelled across one-sixth of the comet's surface.
By the time it came down again, the original landing zone - chosen for its relative safety and ideal amount of sunshine - was left far behind. The lander is now in different, undetermined area that may prove far more hazardous.

The first picture is confusing, but suggests Philae is sitting at an angle. Everyone here is hungry for more news.

Another issue being assessed is the amount of sunlight available to Philae.
The probe left Rosetta with 60-plus hours of battery life, and will need at some point to charge up with its solar panels.
But early reports indicate that in its present position, the robot is receiving only one-and-a-half hours of sunlight during every 12-hour rotation of the comet.
This will not be enough to sustain operations.

As a consequence, controllers here are discussing using one of Philae's deployable instruments to try to launch the probe upwards and away to a better location. But this would be a last-resort option.
First, the team really needs to fully understand where Philae is on the surface and what lies around it.

Holger Sierks, the principal investigator of the science cameras on Philae's mothership, Rosetta, which is circling the comet overhead, said his team was now trying to take pictures of the robot on the surface.
These pictures will show very little detail because Rosetta is many tens of kilometres away, but they will help pinpoint the place the little probe came to rest after its bouncing.

Even if Philae does not live beyond its initial battery life, scientists will be delighted with the data they have already got.
This information will transform what we know about these objects, and enable researchers to test several hypotheses about the formation of the Solar System and the origins of life.
One theory holds that comets were responsible for delivering water to the planets. Another idea is that they could have "seeded" the Earth with the chemistry needed to help kick-start biology.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
A good description of the status quo and possibilities for future activities:

Researchers race to collect comet data from Philae
Posted on November 13, 2014 by Stephen Clark

DARMSTADT, Germany — Comet scientists planned to send up new orders to Europe’s Philae lander Thursday to kick off a second day of research after the probe endured a jumpy touchdown on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Time is of the essence because the oven-sized landing craft is facing a power crunch.
The lander bounced across the comet’s tortured landscape before coming to rest near a cliff that blocks sunlight from reaching Philae’s solar panels, meaning the craft’s power generation system may be unable to recharge its batteries.
Officials said Thursday the Philae might be on its side, with two of its landing legs contacting the comet’s surface and another off the ground.

The first images from Philae’s CIVA camera system — made up of seven micro-cameras in a ring around the lander — appeared to show fragments of rock illuminated by the sun on one side of the probe and the sky on the other side.
Philae’s landing legs also appear in the images.

“We saw both something that man built — the lander — you see the foot there, and something that nature built 4.6 billion years ago, which is a comet essentially preserved as it was at that time, containing all the history that we’re trying to look at,” said Jean-Pierre Bibring, Philae’s chief scientist and head of the CIVA camera team from Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris. “We have no idea what is around, or whether or not what is black is just shadow or open sky.”

Bibring said many scientists expected the comet’s surface to be powdery, allowing the lander to settle instead of rebounding back into space.
“It’s not a powder, it’s a rock, so it’s like a trampoline,” Bibring said. “You go there and it ejects you immediately afterwards.”

Officials have not pinpointed the lander’s location on the comet.
Stephan Ulamec, leader of the Philae team at DLR — the German Aerospace Center — said the landing craft could have bounced up to a kilometer (0.6 miles) off the comet before coming back down a kilometer away from the mission’s intended touchdown site.
“We have a better understanding now of how we got there, but we still do not really know where (the lander is located),” Ulamec said.

According to Ulamec, the next opportunity to contact Philae will be after 1900 GMT (2 p.m. EST) Thursday.
Ground teams based at the European Space Operations Center here, the lander control center in Cologne, Germany and the Philae science team headquarters in Toulouse, France, will uplink commands to the probe Thursday night through the Rosetta orbiter, which released Philae for its seven-hour descent Wednesday.

Ulamec and Bibring said the command upload Thursday night will likely include orders to deploy a boom designed to measure the temperature of the comet’s surface and an X-ray spectroscopy instrument to study the chemical composition of material around Philae’s landing site.
Controllers will also tell Philae to take pictures for another panorama after adjusting the camera’s exposure settings in hopes of improving on the imagery released Thursday.

“We need to be very careful about activating mechanisms,” Ulamec said.
The extension of Philae’s temperature boom could nudge the lander out of its current position. The comet’s feeble gravity field — one hundred thousand times less than Earth — means the lander, which weighed about 220 pounds on Earth, weighs as much as a paperclip after landing.

Officials want to see how the deployment of instrument arms Thursday night changes the lander’s orientation.
“We will be able to see whether this has modified our position,” Bibring said.

Plans to use Philae’s drill, which is supposed to bore nearly a foot into the comet nucleus, pose more problems.
“We are hesitant in the next hours or day to activate the drill because drilling without being anchored and without knowing how we are on the surface is dangerous,” Ulamec said. “We may just tip over our lander.”

The drill is designed to extract a core sample and deliver the soil to a miniaturized laboratory on the lander for analysis. Scientists are trying to find out if the comet contains ice made of water similar to that on Earth, and they are looking for signs of organic molecules like amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Comets may have seeded Earth with water and organics, allowing life to spring up billions of years ago.
Bibring said such measurements are “fundamental” to the Philae mission, but some of the lander’s sensors could gather data in “sniffing mode” not requiring direct contact with the material.
“Of course, we want to drill, but we have to secure the drill,” Bibring said.

Ulamec dismissed discussion — at least for now — of trying to fire the lander’s harpoons, which failed to engage during Philae’s descent Wednesday to anchor the spacecraft to the comet.
Momentum from firing the harpoons — assuming they still work — could propel the lander out of its current location into a more favorable place for exposure to sunlight, which could generate power to keep Philae from freezing.

Philae’s power crisis could drain the lander’s primary and secondary batteries by this weekend.
“Whether this will be able to make it to tomorrow evening, Saturday or Sunday, we don’t know,” Bibring said. “It’s only when it fails do you know how much time you had.” ;)

In a press briefing from Philae’s science operations center in Toulouse earlier Thursday, officials estimated the lander had between 50 and 55 hours of power left in its batteries.
The lander was designed to operate for more than two days on battery power, then recharge its batteries with solar energy for an extended mission that could last until March, when the probe is expected to overheat as the comet nears the sun.

“We see that we get less solar power than we planned for at the nominal landing site,” said Koen Geurts, Philae’s technical manager at the lander control center in Cologne. “We receive about 1.5 hours of sunlight with regard to the 6 or 7 (hours) that we were aiming for. Of course, (this) has an impact on our energy budget and our capabilities to conduct science for extended period of time afterwards.”

Bibring said Philae carries 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of equipment that must be heated to at least minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit) to keep it from freezing. If the hardware gets too cold, the lander will not be able to wake back up again.
“We need energy to survive,” Bibring said. “There is a minimum energy to do that — a few watts.”
In the long-term mission, Philae was expected to wake up for intermittent research observations and hibernate to recharge its batteries.

“We are calculating now what this means for the near future … but unfortunately this is not the situation that we were hoping for,” Geurts said.
With the future of Philae uncertain beyond the weekend, scientists are focused on the short-term.
“We want to pack in as much as we can now,” Bibring said.

http://spaceflightnow.com/2014/11/13/re ... om-philae/
 
'Time for risks' with comet lander

Scientists working on Philae comet lander say it is time to take more risks with the probe, amid fears battery might die in hours


EDIT: There is an expectation that the robot may be entering its last day of useable power on the ice object 67P.
The European Space Agency (ESA) will upload commands today to tell Philae to deploy its drill.
The hope is that it can pull up some samples to analyse in the robot's onboard laboratories.
It is a high risk activity, however, because the torque could destabilise the delicately placed lander.

Philae is sitting in the shadow of a cliff, and will not get enough sunlight to work beyond Saturday.
Friday night's radio contact with the orbiting Rosetta satellite will be the last that engineers have a reasonable confidence will work.

The team is still not sure where on the surface the probe came to rest after bouncing upon landing on Wednesday.
Scientists have been examining radio transmissions between the orbiter and the lander to see if they can triangulate a position.
This work has now produced a "circle of uncertainty" within which Philae almost certainly lies.

Follow-up imagery by Rosetta should now find the little craft, says Paolo Ferri, the head of mission operations at the European Space Agency.
He is still confident that engineers can find an answer to Philae's power shortage.
One solution that will be tried on Friday is to turn the main body of the robot to show the largest of its solar panels to the Sun.
The idea is that this could eke out some more life for the lander.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30050349
 
The Philae lander has attempted to drill into the surface of comet 67/P, amid fears that its battery may die in hours.

Researchers at Esa say the instrument is being deployed to its maximum extent despite the risk of toppling the lander.
Scientists hope they will also be able to capture some samples for analysis in the robot's onboard laboratories.
If the battery dies the results may not make it back to Earth.

Esa reported that the drill has extended 25cm from the lander to try to start collecting samples.
Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager, said: "The drill has been active today, whether it will sample and will succeed in bringing these samples to ovens we shall know this evening.
"This would be fantastic but it is not secured - maybe the battery will be empty before we get contact again."

The Esa team says that the solar panels on the lander are getting small amounts of sunlight, but not enough to maintain operations beyond Saturday.
"We plan to rotate the lander a little bit so that at the position where we have now this one panel that gets sun, we'll have a slightly larger panel and this would increase the chance that at a later stage the lander could wake up again and start talking to us again," Dr Ulamec added.

Valentina Lommats from DLR, the German Space Agency, added that she hoped Philae could bounce its way out of its dark spot
"It's very unlikely, we're just throwing around ideas right now. Hopefully, we'll get the link; that's the most important thing. What happens after that... is cream on the top right now."

Prof Monica Grady of the UK's Open University works on an instrument on Philae called Ptolemy - a shoe-box-sized laboratory.
"One of the other things about the drill, they are hoping it will move the lander but they don't know how much it will move it, and they don't know if it will bring it out to get more sunshine," she told BBC News.

Scientists wanted to test the idea that comets like 67/P may have delivered water to the early Earth billions of years ago. Philae had been due to sample some of the comet's ices to see if their chemical signature matched the water found in our planet's oceans.
But researchers told the BBC that attempts to test the isotopic content of water were power hungry and they are concerned that there will not be enough energy left for the analysis to be carried out.

Two other instruments were deployed overnight, including a thermometer (MUPUS).
It is designed to probe the top layers of the comet to measure the temperature and other properties. The other instrument, APXS, is a mass spectrometer, which uses the mass of atoms to understand their chemical composition.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30055383
 
This is "Uranus". A blue sphere. No details whatsoever. Utterly implausible. And the name once again proves the sodomistic tendencies of these "scientists".

:lol:
 
I'm no astrophysicist but I CAN look upwards to the sky like Brian Cox. I think I can do that just as well as him, if not better, as I can do 'Steely Determination Yet Lost In Wonder' quite well.

However, even I was surprised at the BBC Breakfast News report of the 'Washing Machine Landing on a Comet' coverage where they asked viewers what it looked like. The best representation of the comet was done by someone who rolled up a bit of a blutac and another guy who suggested a Ferrero Roche but the might of the BBC and all its internetabilty could only muster a packaged huddled group cone pack shot. This is because regular viewers of BBC breakfast news aren't generally allowed access to sharp objects to carve and then photograph their brainly visions and then have to express themselves in a fuzzy felt land way the presenters will understand.

But even through this fuzz of Clangerscience, I was wondering 'Hang on. There's virtually no gravity. You're planning on firing harpoons into the comet and the basic Laws of Newton are then going to pop your washing machine off the comet and back into space. And your solar panels aren't going to work where it's dark'.

This is a european hoax psychological experiment with the ultimate goal of ascertaining who sees what's going wrong here surely?
 
Philae comet lander sends more data before losing power
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

The Philae lander on the distant comet 67P has sent another stream of data back to Earth before losing power.
The little probe delivered everything expected from it, just as its failing battery dropped it into standby mode.
Philae is pressed up against a cliff. Deep shadows mean it cannot now get enough light on to its solar panels to recharge its systems.
The European Space Agency fears this contact may have been the robot's last - certainly for a while.

A tweet from the official Philae lander account said: "I'll tell you more about my new home, comet 67P soon… zzzzz."
Philae descended to the comet's surface on Wednesday - the first time in history that a space mission has made a soft landing on a comet.

The next opportunity to talk to Philae will come at around 11:00 GMT on Saturday, when the orbiting Rosetta satellite - which delivered it to the 4km-wide "ice mountain" - comes over the horizon.
But with only 1.5 hours of sunshine falling on the robot during the comet's 12-hour day, it seems doubtful the battery will have recovered enough performance to complete the radio link.

Engineers did manage to maximise the possibility of it happening, though, by sending a command to reorientate the lander.
This involved raising Philae by 4cm and rotating its main housing by 35%. This will ensure the largest solar panel catches the most light.
[Video:Astrophysicist Elizabeth Pearson: "Philae is not dead it's just sleeping"]

Even if the probe falls silent over the weekend, researchers say they are thrilled with the amount of data already acquired.
Stephan Ulamec, lander manager, said: "Prior to falling silent, the lander was able to transmit all science data gathered during the First Science Sequence.
"This machine performed magnificently under tough conditions, and we can be fully proud of the incredible scientific success Philae has delivered."


BBC Sky at Night presenter Chris Lintott watched the radio pass from the European Space Agency's mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.
"It was amazing, and everyone here is elated. If you'd asked them to write down what they'd wanted from this pass - it would have been exactly this," Prof Lintott reported.

In the latest tranche of data are the results from the drilling attempt made earlier in the day.
This had been an eagerly anticipated activity. Getting into the surface layers and bringing up a sample to analyse onboard was seen as central to the core mission of Philae.
Controllers say Cosac, the Philae laboratory that was due to receive the sample, downlinked its data, but that its contents had yet to be assessed.

Among other returns, Philae took another picture of the surface with its downward-looking Rolis camera.
It also exercised its Consert instrument. This is an experiment that sees Philae and Rosetta send radiowaves through the comet to try to discern its internal structure.

And it has the additional possibility of being used to help triangulate a precise position for Philae on the comet's surface.
This is still unknown. Although the robot hit the centre of its intended landing zone on Wednesday, it then bounced twice before coming to a stop.
Knowledge of that final resting location would enable engineers better to understand its predicament and the prospects for future contact if lighting conditions somehow change on 67P.

This could happen as the comet moves through space on its journey around the Sun. It will have the equivalent of seasons, and this could play to Philae's advantage by altering the angle, timing and intensity of the sunlight hitting the solar panels.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30058176
 
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