Philae healthier: Proud ESA shows off first comet surface pic The ESA’s historic comet-landing probot Philae has re-established contact with mission control and is currently stable on the surface. El Reg's space vulture Brid-Aine Parnell reports from mission command at the ESA ops complex at Darmstadt, Germany. Philae takes a first look at the surface of Comet 67P BEHOLD! The first …
With the data only coming in at 26 Kbps it will take some time for the images to actually reach Earth. Then there will be a need to tidy them up for the media etc. Add in the other data the probe is collecting and we have a bottleneck.
And I hope most would agree that the people who have invested years of their lives into this project should get a preview before anyone else.
"And I hope most would agree that the people who have invested years of their lives into this project should get a preview before anyone else."
Unfortunately those people work in silos with no network connection, and have to fetch their personal mobiles from a locker and walk around the car park in search of 2.5G network connections and try to see them from the ESA site. Only to be met with demands for Flash or endlessly loading Youtube :( At least from the digs I get almost 1mbps and a PC. Internally I've only seen an interview with someone who is now a senior manager but that I doubt worked on the project - and the only photo in the article was his face :/
and the magnetometer data! why can't I see the magnetometer data live! why! and the xray spectrometer counts, the gas analysis curves with isotopic ratios? Oh, and I really want to see the MUPUS raw cometary data on mechanical properties, live, as they come in! Can you hear me ESA?
Sod the pictures, who cares about them. I WANNA SEE SOME WIGGLY LINES ON A GRAPH! FROM A COMET! NOW!
:-)
Hmm.. Thanks for the Hi-Res. Notice to the bottom right there appears to have been something similar to a surface melt that might have re-frozen.... and there appears to be a bit of string poking out of it that is also coated in whatever melted.
Soup Dragon indeed..
Blue String Pudding!!!
Comets are made of Blue String Pudding!!!!!1!!
They are the interplanetary equivalent of frozen home deliveries for Clangers.
Another great day as Science answers the mysteries of the Universe.
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Yoiks. I dragged that one into Gimp. Cropped to the relevant area and selected the 'colourise' tool, first time I have ever used it, and the default settings came up with this,
http://i.imgur.com/WTT78u0.png
Proof positive if it were needed.
It is definitely inclined at some angle. Possibly as much as 30 degrees.
You can see one of the antennas resting on the surface in the bottom right of the image.
Perhaps it bounced along until it hit a rock?
Worry is that the solar panels won't get enough power. Maybe they'll try and bounce it again with the harpoons, the drill, or the flywheel after they've done some science.
The only thing that keeps water liquid on the surface of the Earth is about ten tonnes of air pressing on every square metre. Something that hasn't even got enough gravity to mould itself spherical is a bit unlikely to be able to keep much of an atmosphere round itself.
When ice is warmed under a sufficiently low pressure or vacuum, it changes straight to steam without bothering to pass through water.
Look up "Triple point" and be enlightened :)
Is this the leg that is off the floor? If you look to the right of the leg then the black shape could be its shadow thrown onto the rock, assuming light is coming from the left of the photo. Since the shadow and the leg aren't attached, that would suggest this is the leg off the floor? Additionally the leg seems to be very well lit, but you cant see any rock lit at the bottom of it, also suggestive that the leg is not touching the floor.
(I nearly said 'in the air' then. Which would have been an error.)
"Headline -- ESA Spends Billion, Finds Rock." Twat!
Doing this has taken longer and is arguably more difficult than putting a rover on Mars; the patience required alone would have driven me crazy.
THIS IS GREAT SPACE SCIENCE, anyone not impressed has little idea of what is involved in this achievement. People who can, do. People who can't, criticise.
Hitting a comet and landing on it ten years and half a billion K away makes shooting the nuts off a gnat at a mile distance relatively easy.
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