Spacecraft Selfie

erco

Can YOUR bot make a selfie? How about a selfie video as it does a figure 8?

ESA spacecraft Rosetta poses with its comet about 30 miles in the background. ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA



http://news.yahoo.com/rosetta-spacecraft-snaps-gorgeous-selfie-173557978.html

davejames

...this is very cool!

10 years in flight?! Seems just like yesterday...


Read the wiki on it - very intersting, good introductory video also.

Publison

Brought to you by the same guys that did the moon landing. j/k

Looks better than my phone pictures.

erco

The comet landing is scheduled for this Wednesday: http://phys.org/news/2014-11-europe-space-history-comet.html#ajTabs

Speeding towards the Sun at 65,000 kilometres (40,600 miles) per hour, a lab called Philae will detach from its mothership Rosetta, heading for a deep-space rendezvous laden with risk.

Not an easy shape of a comet to land on: "It took a billion calculations to find a decent landing site"—one offering a fair chance that Philae could survive and meet scientific goals...

Touchdown sequence is somewhat simpler than Curiosity's, but still many unknowns: When the lab touches down, it will fire two harpoons to secure it to what—hopefully—will be a robust surface, while a thruster on top of the lander will fire to cancel out bounce. Ice screws in the lander feet will deploy for extra grip. The chances of success? "Seventy percent," said Gaudon, admitting to days of doubt that the chances were much better than one in two.

Best of luck, Rosetta, Philae & ESA!

User Name

erco wrote: »

Best of luck, Rosetta, Philae & ESA!

+10!

Thanks for keeping us updated, erco. What a great mission!

erco

Landed on the comet and Philae is Tweeting! http://www.vox.com/2014/11/12/7204547/comet-pictures-Philae

mindrobots

Wow! That's really cool! It looks like a ........... rock.

The Charlie Brown/NASA connection.

GordonMcComb

And this is what mission leaders hope the spacecraft will bring back.

LA, as viewed from Erco's back yard.

erco

Nice shape described as a rubber duckie.

Snag: The non-Parallax anchoring system apparently failed to deploy: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/moment-truth-europes-ten-mission-081446125.html

Should have used a multicore Propeller for sampling multiple cores!

erco

Great Flicker pics!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/sets/72157638315605535/

Whit

Watched the landing (or message thereof) live today. AMAZING!

User Name

erco wrote: »

Great Flicker pics!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/sets/72157638315605535/

Hey, cool! I hiked that mountain in the second picture of the second row...

Silliness aside, it's almost unbelievably cool to have such detailed pictures of such a marvelously obscure corner of our solar system! Can't wait to see the commotion as that dirty snowball nears the Sun.

erco

Looks like the Philae lander is dead for now, but it sent back more data than Jade Rabbit did. Thumbs up from this country boy.

http://news.yahoo.com/low-battery-comet-probe-alive-uploading-data-esa-224233729.html

Mag748

This is a great one:

"Landing"
http://xkcd.com/1446/

You gotta click the white box to start the applet, then go to the very first image by clicking the <<. Then view it like a flipbook.

erco

Sour grapes or lemons/lemonade? "Good thing our harpoons failed! We meant to do that! Yeah, that's the ticket!"

Next, the Spin doctors will come up with an after-the-fact rationalization about how landing in a solar shadow and going into premature hibernation ultimately saved the mission.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2014/11/30/harpoon-malfunction-may-have-saved-esas-philae-comet-lander/

erco

Place your bets, if & when the Philae lander rises from the dead.

http://news.yahoo.com/european-comet-lander-may-wake-space-slumber-232545821.html

erco

It's alive! http://news.yahoo.com/alive-comet-lander-philae-phones-home-months-silence-160925305.html

erco

Rosetta's mission ended this morning, sending back images as it impacted on the comet.

http://www.startnetzero.net/player/article/ktla-rosetta_probe_crashlands_on_comet-5min

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37520420