Tag: ESA

Can Philae Be Brought Back?

I’m not going to say Ulamec is lying… Oh, what the hell. He’s lying.

The whole team decidedly ISN’T delighted. Everyone expected more. Everyone is disappointed.

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The Rosetta mission continues in orbit circling Comet 67/p. The story from the comet’s surface is a bit more grim. European Space Agency administrators are trying to put their best spin on it, but a series a failures with the Philae lander will severely limit the potential science gained from landing on a comet.

In fact, we might already have everything we’re going to get!

Landing a spacecraft is difficult. Landing on a rock with an uneven surface, gas vents blowing and nearly zero gravity adds even more complexity.

Scientists knew the lander would bounce, so they designed three systems to hold it in place. As far as I can tell none worked!

There has been confusion about the tiny thruster atop the lander. It was supposed to push Philae against the comet. There’s a reference to it in today’s news release, but no explanation.

with no downwards thruster

Without the thruster, the ice screws on each lander leg didn’t hold. Harpoons, designed to firmly affix the lander to 67/p, never even fired!

Philae bounced a few times, then came to rest near a large boulder which blocked access to sunlight. Without a significant solar charge batteries were quickly spent.

At 5:36 PM PST Friday (0036 UTC Saturday) Philae went into ‘hibernation.’ That’s a polite way of saying it’s dead weight on the comet’s surface.

There is a chance as the comet moves closer to the Sun there will be enough light to get things going again. That’s hope more than anything. We’ve probably heard the last from Philae.

“It has been a huge success, the whole team is delighted,” said Stephan Ulamec, lander manager at the DLR German Aerospace Agency, who monitored Philae’s progress from ESA’s Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, this week.

“Despite the unplanned series of three touchdowns, all of our instruments could be operated and now it’s time to see what we’ve got.” ESA news release

I’m not going to say Ulamec is lying… Oh, what the hell. He’s lying.

The whole team decidedly ISN’T delighted. Everyone expected more. Everyone is disappointed.

There’s still a lot going on with the Rosetta orbiter which will follow the comet around the Sun. We’ll learn a lot. But the chance to witness what happens on the surface of a comet as it goes active is now slim.

This mission took decades of planning plus another ten plus years enroute. There won’t be another mission like it in my lifetime.

Everything Had To Go Right… And Didn’t

The probe has come to rest alongside a large boulder. It is blocked from the Sun. Its solar cells, hoping for eight hours of daylight, only get one and a half.

Philae will work for a few days, then run out of juice.

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I am heavily invested in Rosetta and Philae, the orbiter/lander combo at Comet 67/P. It was the focus of my recent trip to NASA JPL and our recent show on Slooh.com. I did lots of show prep.

Everything went right with Philae until it didn’t. It’s ending will deprive science of much of the data they’d hoped for.

Philae was released by Rosetta and dropped toward the comet. The word ESA used was “ballistic.” With nearly zero gravity the 200’ish pound Philae weighed around a gram. The drop took seven hours.

It hit the comet’s surface at walking speed, but the ice screws didn’t grip and its harpoons didn’t deploy.

The harpoons did not fire and Philae appeared to be rotating after the first touchdown, which indicated that it had lifted from the surface again.

Stephan Ulamec, Philae manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center, reported that it touched the surface at 15:34, 17:25 and 17:32 GMT (comet time – it takes over 28 minutes for the signal to reach Earth, via Rosetta). The information was provided by several of the scientific instruments, including the ROMAP magnetic field analyser, the MUPUS thermal mapper, and the sensors in the landing gear that were pushed in on the first impact.

The first touchdown was inside the predicted landing ellipse, confirmed using the lander’s downwards-looking ROLIS descent camera in combination with the orbiter’s OSIRIS images to match features.

But then the lander lifted from the surface again – for 1 hour 50 minutes. During that time, it travelled about 1 km at a speed of 38 cm/s. It then made a smaller second hop, travelling at about 3 cm/s, and landing in its final resting place seven minutes later. ESA news release

The probe has come to rest alongside a large boulder. It is blocked from the Sun. Its solar cells, hoping for eight hours of daylight, only get one and a half.

Philae will work for a few days, then run out of juice. It’s a lander, not a rover.

In the meantime there’s concern deploying some of its instruments could bounce Philae again. No one knows where. At the moment even scientists aren’t even sure where on the comet Philae sits.

There will be good science from this mission, but not as much as hoped for. Space continues to be a supremely challenging pursuit. It is still much too dangerous and expensive to include humans. It always will be that way.

Cool Photos From Mars

Mars Odyssey was launched on 7 April 2001, and reached Mars on 24 October 2001. Mars Global Surveyor left Earth on 7 November 1996, and arrived in Mars orbit on 12 September 1997. Both spacecraft are in an extended mission phase, both have relayed data from the Mars Exploration Rovers, both are continuing to return exciting new results from Mars and both are in somewhat different orbits for safety’s sake.

That makes the photos just in pretty exciting!

They’re the first pictures of a spacecraft orbiting Mars taken by another spacecraft orbiting Mars. In April 2005, the MOC aboard Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) was used to take pictures of the other two spacecraft currently operating in orbit around Mars: NASA’s Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express.