OSIRIS spots Philae drifting across the comet

[1] milligrams isn't a unit of force, but hopefully you know what I mean; milli-ounces sounds too weird.

It seems astronomers have a bias towards assuming dust will cover stuff. Perhaps this says something about their office space.

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/in-space-no-one-can-hear-your-n...

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Gilly

http://www.open.ac.uk/science/pssri/research/missions/rosett...

But your point stands; I know a lot's under embargo right now, I was more wondering if we knew if the drill had successfully retrieved a bit of comet or not rather than specific experimental results which will take some time!

It is not immediately obvious to me why who owns the instrumentation would be a driving factor in the time to see results. Both private research institutes and public institutes would want to get results out as quickly as possible, to capitalize on the PR effect. But that is moderated by the need to perform sufficienly accurate and detailed analysis, which takes time. Those pressures are the same for both public and private research institutes. If anything, the private institues would feel more pressure to publish results quickly, to improve their chances of obtaining future funding.

I cannot tell if you are comparing the quickness of this press release with the lack of results from the scientific packages on Phile, but I will address the (potential) comparison, just in case... Part of reason this press release (with the image of Philae bouncing) was out so quickly is that it does not require a very detailed and specific analysis (requiring roughly the equivalenth of image stictching in photoshop), and the results are fairly straightforward. Additionally, it is not really providing much in the way of new scientific information and so does not have as high a burden of proof. Additionally, the OSIRIS imager has been used to collect data for a while now, so presumably the OSIRIS team has a decent understanding of the real-world operation of the equipment, enabling them to quickly release images in which they were confident. In contrast, the Philae lander's instruments had not provided actual data before the landing, so the instrument teams still need to do the careful calibrations and analysis to understand the systematics.

As far as transmission windows, well we had download-continuation browser solutions back then.

Seriously, not to say it's that simple, but this mission solved much harder problems than imaging would seem to pose.

Really would be interested in knowing how the imgaging solution selection process went and what the key drivers were.

The plan was that Philae would come in at net 0,0 velocity with respect to the normal of the landing site. That involved putting it into an orbit which intercepted the landing site. This was made a bit more challenging as the top thruster on Philae failed to fire, which meant it was unable to circularize its interception orbit. And that resulted in some horizontal motion at the time of landing.

That said, the motion seems to have been well within the safely margin of the harpoon system from what I can read about that subsystem.

Since we aren't on the comet we can only guess what happened but one speculation I've read that seems plausible is that the harpoons "fired" but did not "release", which is to say they tried to move and did not. Imparting a delta-v that was vertical with respect to the surface normal of the landing spot. That delta-v, combined with the landers imperfect alignment, contributed to the sideways journey.

It did confirm that you really do want something like harpoons to hold you to the comet (and potentially to asteroids if you're doing missions to them).