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.

Welcome_to_a_comet_node_full_image_2

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.

Rosetta Reaches The Comet

I have mixed emotions about this sort of project. We spent a boatload of money and untold brain power solving a problem through science, math and engineering. An incredible achievement.

But, aren’t there more pressing practical problems on Earth which would have benefited from this kind of massive effort?

Comet_on_3_August_2014_fullwidth

Comet_on_3_August_2014_fullwidth (1)

As this blog entry goes out a spacecraft has reached a comet. That’s never been done before.

Rosetta launched in 2004 and will arrive at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 6 August. It will be the first mission in history to rendezvous with a comet, escort it as it orbits the Sun, and deploy a lander to its surface. Rosetta is an ESA mission with contributions from its member states and NASA.

ESA is the European Space Agency. They’re running the show.

I have mixed emotions about this sort of project. We spent a boatload of money and untold brain power solving a problem through science, math and engineering. An incredible achievement.

But, aren’t there more pressing practical problems on Earth which would have benefited from this kind of massive effort?

Rosetta, still around 60 miles away from 67P, is transmitting incredibly detailed photos of the weirdly shaped comet. Some have compared the shape to a duck. Potato shaped objects are much more common.

Was it once two separate entities that somehow fused? Does it contain pristine samples from the dawn of the universe 13.77 billion years ago? There are sure to be surprises.

After orbiting this tiny space chunk (about 2 1/4 by 2 1/2 miles though quite irregular) for a while Rosetta will move to an orbit of 30 miles, then 15 miles. Finally, probably in November, a capsule will be deployed from Rosetta to the comet’s surface.

Is this money well spent? It’s certainly splashy science… amazing science. I wish there was a well defined practical payoff.

Incredible Engineering: Rosetta Wakes Up

Comet_approach_node_full_imageNothing is impossible. I say that without fear of contradiction because of what the European Space Agency and NASA have been doing for the last decade. It’s the Rosetta mission.

Rosetta’s job is to monitor a comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, by placing an orbiter around it and a lander on it! It will do this as the comet races toward the inner Solar System.

Rosetta_trajectory_English[1]As you might imagine, catching a comet isn’t easy. Rosetta was launched in 2004 and has made three Earth passes, plus one trip around Mars, all to gain speed and set-up its rendezvous.

To conserve power while coasting through space, Rosetta’s been ‘sleeping.’ Here’s how they list it on the mission timeline.

July 2011 Aphelion/Enter Hibernation

Rosetta_approaching_its_ultimate_destination_Comet_67P_Churyumov-Gerasimenko_node_full_imageAphelion means its furthest point from the Sun. Hibernation… you get that.

Today Rosetta gets its wake-up call! It needs to start processing data. It needs to prepare for its May meet-up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

This is another unbelievably complex and intricate engineering challenge that should be impossible. What could possibly be more difficult than this?

Look, Up In The Sky

Since watching the video today, I’ve been reading as much as I could about the Russian rocket that burned up over the Rocky Mountain States, Thursday.

The beautiful video came from a Denver TV station’s helicopter starting its early morning run aloft. Lucky catch, and well done.

What you see burning up in the atmosphere, the rocket, had only been up since last Wednesday. That doesn’t seem very long.

NORAD says they tracked it all the way. Hey, guys, thanks for the heads up – not!

This rocket was part of the launch vehicle for a French satellite, COROT. Very international – French satellite with six international partners: the European Space Agency (Esa), Austria, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Brazil, launched on a Russian rocket in Kazakhstan. But that’s not the interesting part.

COROT will look for planets, hospitable to life, outside our solar system. There’s a practical idea! What didn’t get funded so this could?

These planets, hopefully around Earth-sized, are too far away to see. We can, however, detect their shadows across the stars they orbit. This is beyond geeky.

I’m sure in the long run, there’s important scientific knowledge to be discerned, but if we find a nice place, it will be much too far to visit. Imagine, a journey taking entire generations. The distant ancestors of the people who decided to go would be the passengers upon arrival.

Not gonna happen.

Someday, COROT too will fall to Earth. Probably a whole less spectacular then.

Amazing Landing Video

NASA has put together a movie of the Huygens probe’s landing on Titan! Holy cow! Even before I knew what I was looking at, I was hooked.

This movie, built with data collected during the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe on Jan. 14, 2005, shows the operation of the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer camera during its descent and after touchdown. The camera was funded by NASA.

Here’s NASA’s explanation, but you might just want to go to the video.

Blogger’s note: Since posting this, I have found the original (higher resolution – much clearer) animation on the Arizona State site.

Beware, at 83 mb this is a very large file. I thought it was worth it.

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.