Philae Lander Nears a Cosmic Touchdown | Hacker News Reader

Philae Lander Nears a Cosmic Touchdown

nytimes.com

57 pointselijahparker10 comments

Hats off to the team who made this work with the available power budget, considering the spacecraft was not really designed to go out that far away from the sun.

Both Rosetta and Philae would have been an excellent use case for nuclear batteries, which would have allowed the lander to send data back for decades. Granted, most of the science data can probably be gathered within the window we have now, but it would have been nice to have a longer-term sensor up there.

I had no idea this was the case:

> Scientists hope that Philae and its 10 instruments will conduct 64 hours of work before its batteries drain.

I'd figured with all the effort to get it out there that it'd be set up to ride the comet down and give us a first-person view of what happens as it loops around the sun.

Such a pity.

The DLR article says that, if the solar panels work, it'll last a lot longer - until it gets too close to the sun and the heat gets too great (about 2AU):

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151...

Ah, that's much better. Thanks!

the article goes on to say the lander has solar panels that will recharge the batteries for additional work (although at a slower pace) as long as it doesn't land in a shadowed area.

That's what Rosetta is for. The Philae lander is just for some surface readings.

A nuclear battery would have been amazing on Huygens. We cojld learn so much about the fascinating moon Titan.

Here's an amazing gallery of images from a distance of 10km: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/High...

I love how the tail, or at least the coma is already projecting into space. I believe it's as far as Jupiter, but the most volatile components must be starting to vaporize.

The spectacle as it gets near the Sun will be gorgeus. And so it could be watching the tail slowy snowing again on the rock.

I wonder if it will break. Other comets are known to fragment in the hottest point. The "duck" shape suggest that's possible, but the perihelium is even longer than Earth's.

Wow. (That's my entry in the understatement-of-the-week contest.)

"At this distance, the image resolution is 84.6 cm/pixel"

That means that if there was a human walking around down there, you could see her (barely, but you could). A car would be clearly visible.

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