Philae Lands!

[Suff]

BBC coverage.

I did note, with some amusement, that two things failed to work properly. The firing of the thruster to land the module and the firing of the grapples to anchor it to the comet. However the feet seem to have secured themselves properly.

I also noted that the communications are intermittently blacking out.

I have some interesting stories about ESA and the way their engineers go about testing.... Like Ariane5. Or the stories I know about Huygens when it hit the surface of Titan and why it had a communications blackout.

I worked at ESOC back in 1996 and a close friend of mine used to be a space operations manager there until he retired recently. It's funny what you hear....

But, in the end, with a lot of hard work and around £1bn, they've pulled off a space first. So I guess it's well done to them.

[Edit]

What was I saying about issues... That was a tad premature. Seems it bounced and has now lost contact..... Ooops.

[Aggers]

Try your skill at landing on a comet........

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29746430

(I got a 100% perfect landing the second time I tried)

[TheOstrich]

I think it's a fantastic achievement .... both Philae and Aggers!

[pederito1]

Almost unbelievable that they could land it there and I shall be very sorry if it breaks away. Wonder why though they chose the name of an Egyptian temple?

[Workingman]

Scientists have the dreams, engineers turn them into reality.

For me the Rosetta mission is up there with Apollo 11, with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, and Voyagers 1 & 2. It was already a huge success getting it out 300 million miles to rendezvous with, and then orbit, an object the size of a block of flats travelling at 34,000 miles an hour. The icing on the cake was getting Philae to land, even with a bounce, and the delicate decorations were the sending back of a message, even if it was only dit, dit, dit, dash, dash, dash, dit, dit, dit.

We have to remember that Rosetta is about as agile as an arthritic slug. It does not have a pilot at the controls to react immediately. If Rosetta sends out "Darmstadt we have a problem" it takes up to an hour for that message to reach "the pilot". It then has to be analysed and sent back, another hour or more, if Rosetta is still there. The predictions of what to do and the precision with which control messages are sent are truly amazing - talk about flying blind!

So far it has only taken one small step, but its giant leap could well overtake that of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, that is if our civilisation is still here to benefit from it.

[TheOstrich]

..... If Rosetta sends out "Darmstadt we have a problem" ......

As a Sci-fi fan, I'd be more concerned about Comet 67P sending out a message: "Control, we have a problem ... seems like some damn Earthling contraption has attached itself to the hull ....."

[Workingman]

[Suff]

Good one Ossie. I like that as a Sci-Fi fan too.

Sadly this kind of thing is almost totally maths and engineering. The more exacting the maths and the better the engineering, the better the result.

When Huygens landed on Titan, it failed to communicate with Darmstadt. Eventually they were able to contact it by the backup communications and upload a software patch so that it could be talked to on the main dish.

I'm guessing that someone did not allow for the incredible cold over that decade and the possible damage caused by the numerous solar flares it must have passed through.

Space, today, needs to be guessed at. It will be decades before we have enough deep space data to anticipate all the things which might go wrong....

However it was an incredible feat of both maths and engineering.