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387 pointsjbogp78 comments

You know I have some bad days some times, but seeing shit like this just makes me think "What a fucking time to be alive!" It's truly incredibly and is sometimes that kick in the pants I need to keep on going. We are living in a golden age of humanity right now, at no point before in human history have so many people had such an incredible quality of life and never before has man been doing such incredible feats and have the ability to reach a worldwide audience almost instantaneously. The fact that just a few hours ago a human designed space craft landed on a comet, after decades of work and I can receive the images fresh from the great minds that brought us this feat, while laying in bed dicking about on my phone, it's just pure and simply astounding.

For all our flaws I love humans and I am so excited to see what the future holds.

Back to the comet, any word on what happened to the harpoons? I heard there was a misfire or they didn't fire or something? Any idea how that's affected the landing as of yet?

I don't think we've gotten any further details than the fact that they didn't fire when they should have. There's a press conference at 2 pm CET.

I'm not sure about that status of the harpoons, but I generally use http://reddit.com/r/space to keep up with all of my space related news. Article quality is generally very high and there are a lot nice folks over there who answer questions in the comments.

Thanks, I'll be sure to keep my eye on that sub

Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend.

"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats

Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell.

Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.

Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.

All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially, ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.

My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )

805 million means the number is down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries.

Source: http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/

That's insane, I had no idea there was any improvement, let alone that much! I just casually assumed the number would be growing along with our total global population, but to know it's actually decreasing as population increases? Wow.

Most of this has been accomplished by economic growth in the most populated areas, mainly China. The situation elsewhere didn't change that much.

For these things the videos by Hans Rosling are a classic, all of them are great and shine a completely different and positive light on where we stand:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_...

Look for the other videos as well, he has a few.

If you're in the mood for good news, 2012 was estimated to be the most peaceful year (percentage of humans to dies by violence) in human (and hominid) history. Slight regression in 2013 & 2014, but still.

The world is big and there are lots of problems, especially when you think of suffering on the scale of millions, but a lot of things are getting better. If you visit some places that are behind on care for orphans, you'll be struck by how foreign it is to see small children begging, stealing and fending for themselves. It doesn't exist in many many places, but you don't have to look more than 2-3 generations before you'll find widows and orphans being a big, huge societal problem. Supporting widows and orphans was often synonymous with charity, "righteousness," and similar. That holds true from the early 20th century back to the beginning of written records.

China is a big part of the high speed exodus from absolute poverty, for all that is wrong with it politically.

The instinct to reject the notion that we are improving on the grounds that there is a lot left to do doesn't come from a bad place. Each life is an entire world of potential, suffering, happiness and love. That makes it hard to quantify. A million people hungry is an unfathomable amount of suffering. Empathy and solidarity are some of our most redeeming qualities. In my opinion, so is exploration. All that said, it's important to know the achievements that have been achieved. There's a bad way of knowing them, self congratulatory nationalism is a terrible one. There are also a good ways. If nothing else, we need to know if we should keep going.

Even if it is so (and we can talk for hours on the validity of this or that data) how do you find the fact that there are enough damned means of production to feed everyone and it's been so for decades now? Also how do you like the fact that there are now about 50-60 MILLION people in US that get food stamps. Or the fact that the wages for most of the western world are falling for 30 years now? ... Whatever.

Before we cut space missions, can we please stop paying so much for warfare and spam first?

> can we please stop paying so much for warfare

an awful lot of research for space has been done with defense budgets

Unfortunately, it is a basic ecological principle that an increase in food results in an increase in population, and humans are not exempt from that. Yes, we have enough food to feed everybody. We have (usually) had enough, not just for decades, but for ten thousand years—ever since agriculture took off, and even more so since the industrial revolution and the Haber process.

However, food production is not enough to eliminate starvation. If you simply transport food to people in an area that can’t support a population increase, all you’re doing is ensuring that there will be more people there to starve in the next generation, and continually increasing costs of transporting food there.

You need to establish local economy and agriculture, or it’s not sustainable. And if such infrastructure can’t be put in place, you need to get people out of there.

Of course, I don’t know how to do that, nor do I know how to solve the economic problems you mention, but that is what needs to be done.

1. Food production IS more than enough. Logistics and storage is not there.

2. Growth of population declines as countries get more developed, while the food availibility increases. That was true in Europe, USA, Japan, China.

I don't see a reason why this shouldn't work the same for remaining undeveloped countries.

So I don't think your ecological principle works on human.

When I said “food production is not enough to eliminate starvation” I did not mean “we don’t produce enough food to eliminate starvation”, I meant “producing more food is not enough to eliminate starvation”. So yes, I agree and already stated that the problems are economic.

Suppose this principle did not hold. Then how would the human population of Earth continue to grow? In other words, what would all the new people be made of?

Population won't grow forever, not because of lack of food, but because (most) people would have better things to do than care for 6 kids, and 6 kids won't have positive effect on their wealth (it's already the case in the developed world - check out natural growth in Europe or Japan).

So more food = more people is not true.

People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups. Besides these, there also are people that see nothing more important (but not necessarily better) than leaving behind their own kind as offspring. Unless some effect kicks in, like a social drive that instill in the masses the idea of breeding less as it's in western culture, or a government-enforced program to artificially control the demographic dynamic as in China, these kind of people will prevail in the long run. And that's a good thing, I think.

> People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups.

This is not "if" this is "when".

But it will take centuries, a lot things can change in the meantime, so we don't know what will happen in the end, but assuming constant growth when the growth in devleoped countries is over already is weird.

Prognoses for world population already show the growth stopping in next few decades.

Additionally, the UN millenium development goal of halving world poverty by 2010 was met ~2005.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/half-a-billion-people-escap...

I'm not well versed enough in world hunger problems to talk about it, but on the Global Peace side, we are currently in the least violent period in the last 2000 years.

I think you should look at these things in perspective, by no means is our society perfect, in relation to literally any point in history before maybe the fall of the Soviet Union, this world was objectively worse. Global conflicts are operating on much smaller scales, the environmental front has a hell of a lot of people fighting to improve current conditions, the economy isn't a boiler ready to explode. We are NOT in the middle ages in ANY of those sectors, to even suggest that tells me you've actually got 0 idea of what this world or what historically we looked like. We aren't burning witches or beheading people, we aren't accusing mentally ill people of being possessed by the devil. We have medicine, we have food, we can communicate with people around the world instantaneous. People are moving away from separated communities and becoming a global entity.

Look buddy, in the end our perspective on the world is what you decide it is and while we aren't living in the Garden of Eden our world is pretty top notch presently and in relation to any point in human history the world is great and only getting better.

So remove your pessimist spectacles and try and enjoy life and think optimistically, you only get one whip around and would you rather spend it disappointed and grumpy at the world or hopeful and excited?

>My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )

Also that was probably the snarkiest smug comment and it makes me think you like the smell of your own farts

The wealth gap can be misleading too, since the quality of life for those at the 'bottom' is often better than it ever has been on just about every metric you care to consider.

Of those things, especially if you compare it with, say, a century ago, only the environment is really in trouble. Which is bad enough, of course, but when looking at hunger and peace, we are actually doing pretty well.

Yes the world isn't perfect and theres still a shit ton wrong, regardless we're better off than we've ever been before except perhaps on the environment.

Actually, the statistics today are largely better than at any point in history we have statistics for.

Here's a nice aggregate:

http://daeken.com/2014-04-16_Spoiler__The_World_Isn_t_On_Fir...

There is a shitload of good things going on in the world. You just have to pull your head out of the negativity echochamber present in a lot of Internet communities, most notably parts of reddit.

Every age has its little people whose entire contribution to public discourse is to complain about how dreadful everything is. They add nothing good to the world. They don't feed the hungry or clothe the homeless the way creative people operating within the framework of capitalism, the rule of law and global trade have been doing for the past several hundred years. They just complain about how awful everything is.

I'm not sure why they consider this a worthwhile thing. Clearly they are capable of identifying problems, but aren't capable of doing anything about them. As such, they should get out the way of the people who are actually solving them. A hundred years ago such people were complaining that capitalism and global trade were evil and destructive, and they and their fellow-travelers attempted several more-or-less violent approaches to overthrowing them, which held back human development by decades and destroyed tens of millions of lives.

Despite those abject failures, the same anti-empirical wingnuts are back today, when capitalism, the rule of law and global trade have created an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity--exactly as their irrational predecessors predicted would never and could never happen. But they don't let anything so Enlightened as mere empirical reality prevent them from continuing their litany of complaint and opposition to progress.

Seems some people complain as a survival strategy: enough whining will persuade others to resolve problems & supply needs, if only to shut that person up.

To get an idea of the scale of the thing, here is a picture of the comet relative to the size of London :

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/Comet_over_L...

I had no idea the thing was so small. To get something to intercept an object that size traveling at 1000's mph is an amazing feat!

Textbook comment right here.

From Reddit[1]:

"Got fresh news from the team, they are broadcasting live right now on french TV ! Philae landed, and bounced slowly for (1-2-? hours), and travelled 1km away the targetted site. Yes 1000m. Then know this because of the datas from the radar. It's now stopped slanted, some cams are shooting the sky, other the ground, and other nearby rocks, as seen on the first photo. It's inside some kind of cave/hole, not much sun for the solar panels.

EDIT1: It landed on the core of the comet, it sees the light from the sun for about 1 to 2 hours per day. In the next days/week the angle of the comet will change/sun, and it very likely the solar panel will get more sunlight so more power for the probe.

EDIT2 : Many labs are performing right now and performed the whole night. For now they put the drilling on hold since they don't know if it's tied to the ground or not. Drilling op was also power hungry so it's kinda a good thing it's on hold since there's not much sun available for the panels. Battery life been re-estimated to 50-55hours due to the lack of sunlight. This time includes the 7 hours of descent.They are constantly adjusting missions goals, depending on conditions, power available, etc,

EDIT3 : The probe has been working to gather scientifict datas the whole time, including during the bounces. There's already a large amount of datas available, whatever happens next.

EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in, it's not burried into soft soil.

EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can communicate with the orbiter, but that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's already a lot of datas transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact between the orbiter and the probe can be approximately done twice per day.

EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned, flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there.

EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at 5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the datas from the first batch of tests."

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2m63hd/first_civa_ima...

> travelled 1km away the targetted site. Yes 1000m.

Wow, I think this is great luck, that the probe is still on the comet, and even seems to work properly.

Does the comet have enough gravity to hold on to dust? How do these small space objects even stay together?

> Does the comet have enough gravity to hold on to dust?

Yes. Philae's weight on the comet is roughly equivalent to a few ounces/100g* on Earth. It's why there's so much concern about it not being anchored correctly; deploy the wrong instrument and you might push it away from the surface and out into space. So there is a significant gravitational attraction from the comet, just not very much!

* I've seen a few different estimates for this, but it's of this order.

> I've seen a few different estimates for this

Considering the comet's irregular shape, it probably depends a lot on exactly where the lander is.

The full panorama is available: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/Comet_panora...

That's a great achievement in any case. I'm just slightly worried from the looks of this picture that Philae actually stabilized on its side.

Also the large amount of shadow in the area is worrisome for the solar panels to function properly.

Press conference with the release of a full panorama (which will hopefully not confirm the side landing) is scheduled for 1400 CET.

The sunlight appears to be coming from behind and to the left of Philae in this picture, at a fairly low angle, so the back of it should (I hope) be reasonably illuminated at the moment.

It's definitely not clear from this picture which way is "up". It looks to me like up may be towards the top right of the picture, in which case Philae may be at a 45 degree angle. But I'm probably wrong - the full panorama should tell all.

After staring at the image a lot more, I realised I'm completely wrong. The leg reveals which way the lighting is coming from - above, slightly to the left, and probably slanting slightly into the camera. So my original interpretation of the orientation cannot be correct.

The real question is whether the picture should be rotated 90+ degrees clockwise.

The lander's leg is very well lit and there is clearly nothing underneath it. The antenna appears (based on it's end converging with it's own shadow) to be resting against either a rock or the surface.

I'm not a rocket scientist ... I hope I'm grossly misinterpreting this image!

Also very interesting, if you look at the high-res picture and zoom at the bottom right, you'll notice some sort of cable on the ground/boulder.

This could be the cable from one of the harpoons that may have fired but didn't anchor themselves, or it could be a feature attached to Philae that's in the field of vision.

It looks like it's resting on one of the antennae. You can see its shadow underneath it.

That's one of the audio cables from the sound stage. If you look closely you can see the shadow of a boom mic on one of the rocks.

My first thought was: "Why would they need a mic? There's no sound in space" and then I felt the whoosh over my head. Well done.

The sheen coming from the surface where light hits is indicative of some interesting materials on that comet. Looking forward to more photos and especially analysis of the surface composition!

Looks like a pretty rough place to land - I wonder though if this is one of the 'bounce' phases of the landing, and maybe what ended up happening was that it was more of a tumble, due to surface features snagging a leg, or something.. I must admit that during the approach, the landing site looked to me like it might have been 'pretty smooth', like it was a plane of material that didn't look too jagged and nasty, but this photo just looks like we landed in a pretty rough spot. Regardless, seems like some science is going to get done anyway, and that sure is exciting! Can't wait for 14:00 and see some new pics ..

Does it have a colour camera? or maybe it's a bandwidth-saving decision to transmit only B&W? or because of the lighting?

Apparently the visible light sensor has RGB color filters.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=PHILA...

I would guess these are probably not a Bayer filter pattern, but filters that are mechanically swapped.

I remember having read long time ago that superposing B&W images took with those filters gives an also B&W image that our brain perceives as coloured. Does anybody know if this is correct or what's the name of that effect?

I'm not sure. I thought of the "False Color" concept, but that's pretty much the exact opposite of what you said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color

If you send three grayscale images, each one taken through a different colored filter, you can reconstruct a color image back on earth by setting the red channel, green channel, and blue channel of the image to be each one of the colored filters you used to capture the image.

This isn't a grayscale image that our brain perceives on color, but rather several grayscale images, each colored separately to combine into a color image.

I seriously doubt an actual effect exists that makes us believe black and white images are actually colored.

The pictures taken by Rosetta are BW. From [0]: "Some light contrast enhancements have been made to emphasise certain features and to bring out features in the shadowed areas. In reality, the comet is extremely dark -– blacker than coal. The images, taken in black-and-white, are grey-scaled according to the relative brightness of the features observed, which depends on local illumination conditions, surface characteristics and composition of the given area. Some slight vignetting can also be seen in the corners of some images." So possibly Philae has a similar system. [0] https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/1573996637...

Curious question, is the light in the picture all from the Sun or do they use something artificial?

All from the sun.

Possibly stupid question: why are all the images greyscale? Could we not send a color camera? Or is the comet very grey? Or does color not work in space?

color works just fine

I know that sometimes, images are first sent in black and white to save on data, color is sent later.

Hubble apparently only does black and white. color images can be obtained using a technique involving two of its black and white images. But that is a telescope, probably not similar.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of...

the comet could just be grey, not sure about that one.

Also, cameras are much more sensitive and higher resolution if they are B&W. A colour camera has to have a bayer matrix filter in front of the pixels (or some other weird trick) which throws away a load of the light.

Generally, when telescopes want colour images, they will take several pictures with different filters in front of the telescope, then combine them. This is useful because you can have a wide selection of filters, including ones for specific science-related wavelengths, like hydrogen alpha, or oxygen emissions. A normal colour camera is limited to three filters.

The comet is in fact very very black, but pretty much all cameras are greyscale. Most 'colour' cameras are just a series of filters placed over the pixels to sense only light of the desired colour (usually RGB)

When science has to be done, it's easier to have a selectable set of filters you can put in front of the whole sensor at once. This way you can use the full sensor resolution and you can have a wider variety of filters. They also tend to bring along spectrometers of some description which are again much much more useful.

So "Armageddon" was right. A comet looks much more interesting than the Moon or Mars. No boring dunes and flat sands, really rocky.

I'd say this is a far-cry from that dramatization, but hey, they weren't as far off as we thought!

Comet 67P seems a lot more rugged than previous comets we've been to.

Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, and now comet 67p.

Absolutely amazing.

Don't forget asteroid Itokawa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa

I think he was talking about actual landings. Hayabusa/its lander MINERVA failed to land

> In November 2005, it landed on the asteroid and collected samples in the form of tiny grains of asteroidal material, which were returned to Earth aboard the spacecraft on 13 June 2010.

(from the Wikipedia article)

Yes, the lander failed, but the bus itself did land on the surface. It was a sample return mission which is in many ways a greater feat.

MINERVA failed to land, but Hayabusa made a series of soft landings on to the asteroid in 2005, and collected samples that were returned to Earth. Pretty amazing in its own right and time.

Space probe NEAR-Shoemaker landed on asteroid Eros in 2001!

What is amazing about this landing is that the probe had no landing gear, no shock absorbers, and was not designed in any way to land. NASA engineers tuned the orbit carefully and slowly and we're able to match velocities for a soft landing for what was otherwise supposed to be an orbiting spacecraft.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEAR_Shoemaker

(Edit - fixed asteroid name)

It almost seems like "landing" is too strong a word: Philae has a mass of 100kg and the gravity of Churyumov–Gerasimenko is estimated to be 10e−3 m/s2, which comes out to a weight of 3.5 ounces, or the equivalent of 100 grams on earth. Let's hope it holds!

10e-3 m/s^2 is hard to believe, as the lander would have to be ~250m away from the center of mass [1]. More likely it is 2500m away from the center of mass, giving 6.67e-11 * 1.0e13 / 2500 ^ 2 = 0.0001 m/s^2, so about 1 gram.

[1] I can't find a reliable estimate of the surface gravity online, but the mass estimate at http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/21/determining-the-mass... seems accurate.

Thanks to the sorta dumbbell shape, depending on where Philae landed the apparent gravity may be a LOT less, should a considerable amount of the comet's mass be "above" the lander. (Think "what's the pull of gravity in the center of a planet?")

I'm curious to know, how far will the landing affect it's orbit?

The probe is very small compared to the comet, so probably hardly at all. http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/09/Philae_s_pri...

are you thinking if we can potentially deflect comets?

Yep :)

This is exciting. I'm excited.

My reaction to this photo is a little funny. Basically: "Rocks! We have rocks too! Yours look a lot like ours."

I have this desire to find things in common. Like flirting.

That single image is quite impactful if you know the background to the project. It's like something out of a movie.

Ok this has been bugging me...

What is a "CIVA Image"? Everyone is using the term - but not explaining what it is!

I think its referring to this: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/CIVA

This is pretty crazy and awesome!

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