Landing on a Comet, 317M Miles from Home | Hacker News Reader

Landing on a Comet, 317M Miles from Home

nytimes.com

146 pointsdnetesn19 comments

The mediocre engineer in me can't look at those photos and just appreciate them...all I can think about is...geez, the mechanical acuity to took to make sure all the moving pieces moved...from the shutter to the antenna that receives the signal and transmits the data...at the right time, 300+ million miles away. What a party those engineers must he having right now.

Came across the other NYT news article on this...this is the kind of detail that I imagine must keep those rocket engineers up for many nights during and after launch:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/science/space/european-spa...

> The operation proceeded despite a few small glitches and one potential showstopper problem: an apparent failure of a thruster that was to fire right after touchdown to press the lander against the comet’s surface. A pin was supposed to break a wax seal on the gas tank, but repeated attempts did not appear to succeed.

I'm thinking the same thing, and adding that they launched it 10 years ago... and had to avoid planets and other space junk while doing a crazy orbit until it could fling of to meet the comet at a precise location... But I wonder if engineers can change things a bait after launch with thrusters?

Wow. Those photos of the comet are just amazing.

I know those photos are real, and I know our understanding of the universe has made them possible, but they still seem like science-fiction magic to me. I'm still looking at them in awe.

Thank you for sharing them.

The ESA has their own Flickr album of the Rosetta mission (with more pics), for anyone interested

https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/sets/72157...

It landed but the harpoon did not fire. I'm not sure what that means, but XKCD is live-drawing the event and has the Philae Lander's status as ???, so now I'm worried.

http://xkcd.com/

http://xkcd1446.org/

https://twitter.com/Philae2014

That's 510 million kilometers for the rest of the world.

Normally I would've considered your comment a bit too glib...but in my total ignorance of this mission, I had assumed it was a NASA project. If the headline had mentioned "kilometers" -- and I can't imagine the metric system not being used by engineers regardless of nationality -- I don't think I would've been so quick to assume it was a NASA accomplishment.

> and I can't imagine the metric system not being used by engineers regardless of nationality

You must be aware of the Mars Climate Orbiter incident [0] that metric people are quick to raise when dealing with this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

I'm stunned that there is a dusty surface that looks like sand. How much gravity does the comet have?

"The acceleration due to gravity on the surface of Churyumov–Gerasimenko has been estimated for simulation purposes at 10^(−3) m/s^2, or about one ten-thousandth of that on Earth."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen...

So it seems safe to say that a 'landslide' will not occur (as suggested by one of the captions). Instead, a boulder might break off and float away? The whole thing must be held together by the chemical bonds inherent to the material.

Hard to say. The whole point of sending a robot to the comet is to see what it's made of and how the surface is set up. It could be all loose snow, it could be rock, could be something else.

Why the Comet 67P/C-G, as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope array ( http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/11/08/rosetta... ) is so different than close-up? Here for example, I can't see any trails or fire. Is also white instead of orange? Can be this caused by the speed? http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/11/08/rosetta...

The sensors involved are very unlike the human eye, and unlike each other. And they aren't color, either, anything that shows color involves adding together several monochrome images taken with different filters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykzg5X41-_E What blows my mind is that "a million miles away from home" isn't at all far away as far in a space context. (Link goes to cheesy song)

> (Link goes to cheesy song)

And I thought for sure it was going to be this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk

I studied telecommunications and this stuff is really fascinating. From job prospects though your options are fairly limited.

Does anyone know what type of waves are used for commucation at such large distance ? I know satellite uses microwave communication but not sure what could they possibly using for communicating to 317 M miles ? Do they use booster and amplifier satellites intermediaries ? I would interested to know more about signal and communication setup and instruments used.

Rocket science for the Europeans, still miles and yards for Americans.

"The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines the asteroid belt" -NDT

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