PICTURES FROM THE COMET. BUT WHERE'S THE KABOOOM.
Posted on 11/13/2014 4:56:14 PM PST by NormsRevenge
After a historic but awkward comet landing, the robot probe Philae is now stable and sending pictures - but there are concerns about its battery life.
The lander bounced twice, initially about 1km back out into space, before settling in the shadow of a cliff, 1km from its intended target site.
It may now be problematic to get enough sunlight to charge its battery systems.
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The key issue vexing controllers right now is the lighting conditions.
Philae is receiving about 1.5 hours of illumination during every 12-hour rotation of the comet.
This will be insufficient to top up its battery system once the primary charge it had on leaving Rosetta runs out. That was some 60-plus hours.
It means Philae is unlikely to be operating in its present state beyond Saturday.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
That’s what I’ve been reading.
This is terra incognito, don't forget, so I don't think any such thing is obvious. It's a 1/10000 g environment, for starters. That whole area below the big rock has the same sort of blurry appearance.
I will agree these Euros are kind of a dodgy lot. Who besides me heard the big honcho announce, in the middle of the celebration, that the harpoon had fired and "recoiled" or something? I'm sure the technos new better, but just deferred to him.
It’s weight with respect to the comet is about a gram, and it was designed apparently to utilize that tiny gravitational tug to land and sink grapples.
PICTURES FROM THE COMET. BUT WHERE'S THE KABOOOM.
Nuclear power is the obvious solution for spacecraft ;solar panels are fragile and the inverse square law rapidly reduces available power as you get farther out.
Crazed non-scientific enviro-terrorists have cost us trillions of dollars and millions of lives made poorer or even cut short..
But generating enough “bounce” to take jump 1km and then having enough enough gravity exerted to come back down is something I can’t get my mind around.
Of course my degrees are focused more towards the life sciences, not physics.
With the limited gravity on that rock, it weighs less than an ounce.
220 lbs on earth, as is.
Ya, I think they lacked some imagination when it comes to contingency planning.
Esa would have never been able to pull off a mars landing. The whole landing mechanism failed. Now i will give them stuff happens to mechanical systems a decade in space. Hitting the comet is not hard.
Probably wasn't politically correct.
OOOOH! The Q32 Explosive Space Modulator. like the Space Harpoons, has failed to operate!
I read somewhere today that firing the harpoons to bounce it to another location was something they were considering as a last resort. There apparently is another instrument — a scoop or something — that could be used in a similar way.
I’m trying not to be too critical at the moment.
We launch our Orion EFT-1 in 3 weeks.
Wasn’t the Ford Probe a Japanese Mazda?
All of space science is dodgy as hell. Check this article out:
One honcho at todays press briefing mentioned that the retractor reels activated even though the harpoon darts didn’t fire. Maybe he was trying to clarify what you heard him say yesterday? Keep in mind that they theorize that a comet is made of ice, so I am sure the harpoon anchors were designed to embed in ice. Suppose a comet is rock. I think that if you tried to fire ice-harpoons into solid rock you might just knock yourself a half-mile or so away from the comet. Should we be buying this half-mile high bounce explanation (from a meter per second speed on impact of an object weighing a gram)?
The mass of the lander is given as 100 kg. At 10-4 g that is 10 gram-mass units of "weight" on earth. In a constant g-field of this strength, the height of a 1 m/sec launch is 1/2 g t2 = 1/2 v2 / g = 500 meters . It should have rebounded less than this, as the landing was "damped", but I think the 1 km value was supposed to be a lateral distance, so it's of the right order.
Could it be corrupted data or even a dirty lens?
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