
Welcome to a comet - jbogp
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/Welcome_to_a_comet
======
Lrigikithumer
You know I have some bad days some times, but seeing shit like this just makes
me think "What a fucking time to be alive!" It's truly incredibly and is
sometimes that kick in the pants I need to keep on going. We are living in a
golden age of humanity right now, at no point before in human history have so
many people had such an incredible quality of life and never before has man
been doing such incredible feats and have the ability to reach a worldwide
audience almost instantaneously. The fact that just a few hours ago a human
designed space craft landed on a comet, after decades of work and I can
receive the images fresh from the great minds that brought us this feat, while
laying in bed dicking about on my phone, it's just pure and simply astounding.

For all our flaws I love humans and I am so excited to see what the future
holds.

Back to the comet, any word on what happened to the harpoons? I heard there
was a misfire or they didn't fire or something? Any idea how that's affected
the landing as of yet?

~~~
badname
Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend.

"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a
healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth."
[http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats](http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)

Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like
hell.

Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.

Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.

All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We
don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially,
ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.

My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )

~~~
Tepix
805 million means the number is down more than 100 million over the last
decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the
prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally
and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries.

Source:
[http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/](http://www.fao.org/publications/sofi/en/)

~~~
viewer5
That's insane, I had no idea there was any improvement, let alone that much! I
just casually assumed the number would be growing along with our total global
population, but to know it's actually decreasing as population increases? Wow.

~~~
netcan
If you're in the mood for good news, 2012 was estimated to be the most
peaceful year (percentage of humans to dies by violence) in human (and
hominid) history. Slight regression in 2013 & 2014, but still.

The world is big and there are lots of problems, especially when you think of
suffering on the scale of millions, but a lot of things are getting better. If
you visit some places that are behind on care for orphans, you'll be struck by
how foreign it is to see small children begging, stealing and fending for
themselves. It doesn't exist in many many places, but you don't have to look
more than 2-3 generations before you'll find widows and orphans being a big,
huge societal problem. Supporting widows and orphans was often synonymous with
charity, "righteousness," and similar. That holds true from the early 20th
century back to the beginning of written records.

China is a big part of the high speed exodus from absolute poverty, for all
that is wrong with it politically.

The instinct to reject the notion that we are improving on the grounds that
there is a lot left to do doesn't come from a bad place. Each life is an
entire world of potential, suffering, happiness and love. That makes it hard
to quantify. A million people hungry is an unfathomable amount of suffering.
Empathy and solidarity are some of our most redeeming qualities. In my
opinion, so is exploration. All that said, it's important to know the
achievements that have been achieved. There's a bad way of knowing them, self
congratulatory nationalism is a terrible one. There are also a good ways. If
nothing else, we need to know if we should keep going.

------
gokhan
From Reddit[1]:

 _" Got fresh news from the team, they are broadcasting live right now on
french TV ! Philae landed, and bounced slowly for (1-2-? hours), and travelled
1km away the targetted site. Yes 1000m. Then know this because of the datas
from the radar. It's now stopped slanted, some cams are shooting the sky,
other the ground, and other nearby rocks, as seen on the first photo. It's
inside some kind of cave/hole, not much sun for the solar panels.

EDIT1: It landed on the core of the comet, it sees the light from the sun for
about 1 to 2 hours per day. In the next days/week the angle of the comet will
change/sun, and it very likely the solar panel will get more sunlight so more
power for the probe.

EDIT2 : Many labs are performing right now and performed the whole night. For
now they put the drilling on hold since they don't know if it's tied to the
ground or not. Drilling op was also power hungry so it's kinda a good thing
it's on hold since there's not much sun available for the panels. Battery life
been re-estimated to 50-55hours due to the lack of sunlight. This time
includes the 7 hours of descent.They are constantly adjusting missions goals,
depending on conditions, power available, etc,

EDIT3 : The probe has been working to gather scientifict datas the whole time,
including during the bounces. There's already a large amount of datas
available, whatever happens next.

EDIT4 : It's resting on "hard" ground, with a layer of dust about 30cm, and
that's good news because it allows measurements to proceed as planned. As in,
it's not burried into soft soil.

EDIT5 : Solar panels are deployed, radio link is up and running, but the fact
the probe is slanted/in a hole/random ground limits the time it can
communicate with the orbiter, but that's not jeopardizing the mission. There's
already a lot of datas transmitted successfully to the orbiter. Contact
between the orbiter and the probe can be approximately done twice per day.

EDIT6 : The first place it touched the comet was exaclty where it was planned,
flat and cosy, too bad it didn't harpoon there.

EDIT7 : Next contact will be near 19:30GMT, until 23:45GMT approx. This night
they made contact with the probe (from the orbiter) at about 4:00GMT, and at
5:30GMT they had safely recovered all the datas from the first batch of
tests."_

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2m63hd/first_civa_ima...](http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2m63hd/first_civa_image_confirming_that_philae_is_on/cm19x10)

~~~
netcan
Does the comet have enough gravity to hold on to dust? How do these small
space objects even stay together?

~~~
Osmium
> Does the comet have enough gravity to hold on to dust?

Yes. Philae's weight on the comet is roughly equivalent to a few ounces/100g*
on Earth. It's why there's so much concern about it not being anchored
correctly; deploy the wrong instrument and you might push it away from the
surface and out into space. So there is a significant gravitational attraction
from the comet, just not very much!

* I've seen a few different estimates for this, but it's of this order.

~~~
lisper
> I've seen a few different estimates for this

Considering the comet's irregular shape, it probably depends a lot on exactly
where the lander is.

------
jbogp
That's a great achievement in any case. I'm just slightly worried from the
looks of this picture that Philae actually stabilized on its side.

Also the large amount of shadow in the area is worrisome for the solar panels
to function properly.

Press conference with the release of a full panorama (which will hopefully not
confirm the side landing) is scheduled for 1400 CET.

~~~
mhandley
The sunlight appears to be coming from behind and to the left of Philae in
this picture, at a fairly low angle, so the back of it should (I hope) be
reasonably illuminated at the moment.

It's definitely not clear from this picture which way is "up". It looks to me
like up may be towards the top right of the picture, in which case Philae may
be at a 45 degree angle. But I'm probably wrong - the full panorama should
tell all.

~~~
mhandley
After staring at the image a lot more, I realised I'm completely wrong. The
leg reveals which way the lighting is coming from - above, slightly to the
left, and probably slanting slightly into the camera. So my original
interpretation of the orientation cannot be correct.

The real question is whether the picture should be rotated 90+ degrees
clockwise.

------
jbogp
Also very interesting, if you look at the high-res picture and zoom at the
bottom right, you'll notice some sort of cable on the ground/boulder.

This could be the cable from one of the harpoons that may have fired but
didn't anchor themselves, or it could be a feature attached to Philae that's
in the field of vision.

~~~
andrewd18
That's one of the audio cables from the sound stage. If you look closely you
can see the shadow of a boom mic on one of the rocks.

~~~
mirkules
My first thought was: "Why would they need a mic? There's no sound in space"
and then I felt the whoosh over my head. Well done.

------
binarymax
The sheen coming from the surface where light hits is indicative of some
interesting materials on that comet. Looking forward to more photos and
especially analysis of the surface composition!

------
fit2rule
Looks like a pretty rough place to land - I wonder though if this is one of
the 'bounce' phases of the landing, and maybe what ended up happening was that
it was more of a tumble, due to surface features snagging a leg, or
something.. I must admit that during the approach, the landing site looked to
me like it might have been 'pretty smooth', like it was a plane of material
that didn't look too jagged and nasty, but this photo just looks like we
landed in a pretty rough spot. Regardless, seems like some science is going to
get done anyway, and that sure is exciting! Can't wait for 14:00 and see some
new pics ..

------
muyuu
Does it have a colour camera? or maybe it's a bandwidth-saving decision to
transmit only B&W? or because of the lighting?

~~~
Zeebrommer
The pictures taken by Rosetta are BW. From [0]: "Some light contrast
enhancements have been made to emphasise certain features and to bring out
features in the shadowed areas. In reality, the comet is extremely dark -–
blacker than coal. The images, taken in black-and-white, are grey-scaled
according to the relative brightness of the features observed, which depends
on local illumination conditions, surface characteristics and composition of
the given area. Some slight vignetting can also be seen in the corners of some
images." So possibly Philae has a similar system. [0]
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/1573996637...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/europeanspaceagency/15739966376/in/set-72157638315605535)

------
lentil_soup
Curious question, is the light in the picture all from the Sun or do they use
something artificial?

~~~
jbogp
All from the sun.

------
jamesfisher
Possibly stupid question: why are all the images greyscale? Could we not send
a color camera? Or is the comet very grey? Or does color not work in space?

~~~
NeverEnough
color works just fine

I know that sometimes, images are first sent in black and white to save on
data, color is sent later.

Hubble apparently only does black and white. color images can be obtained
using a technique involving two of its black and white images. But that is a
telescope, probably not similar.

[http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of...](http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/)

the comet could just be grey, not sure about that one.

~~~
mnw21cam
Also, cameras are much more sensitive and higher resolution if they are B&W. A
colour camera has to have a bayer matrix filter in front of the pixels (or
some other weird trick) which throws away a load of the light.

Generally, when telescopes want colour images, they will take several pictures
with different filters in front of the telescope, then combine them. This is
useful because you can have a wide selection of filters, including ones for
specific science-related wavelengths, like hydrogen alpha, or oxygen
emissions. A normal colour camera is limited to three filters.

------
rurban
So "Armageddon" was right. A comet looks much more interesting than the Moon
or Mars. No boring dunes and flat sands, really rocky.

~~~
Lambdanaut
I'd say this is a far-cry from that dramatization, but hey, they weren't as
far off as we thought!

Comet 67P seems a lot more rugged than previous comets we've been to.

------
IndianAstronaut
Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, and now comet 67p.

Absolutely amazing.

~~~
avian
Don't forget asteroid Itokawa.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa)

~~~
NietTim
I think he was talking about actual landings. Hayabusa/its lander MINERVA
failed to land

~~~
avian
> In November 2005, it landed on the asteroid and collected samples in the
> form of tiny grains of asteroidal material, which were returned to Earth
> aboard the spacecraft on 13 June 2010.

(from the Wikipedia article)

Yes, the lander failed, but the bus itself did land on the surface. It was a
sample return mission which is in many ways a greater feat.

------
zachrose
It almost seems like "landing" is too strong a word: Philae has a mass of
100kg and the gravity of Churyumov–Gerasimenko is estimated to be 10e−3 m/s2,
which comes out to a weight of 3.5 ounces, or the equivalent of 100 grams on
earth. Let's hope it holds!

~~~
stromgo
10e-3 m/s^2 is hard to believe, as the lander would have to be ~250m away from
the center of mass [1]. More likely it is 2500m away from the center of mass,
giving 6.67e-11 * 1.0e13 / 2500 ^ 2 = 0.0001 m/s^2, so about 1 gram.

[1] I can't find a reliable estimate of the surface gravity online, but the
mass estimate at [http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/21/determining-the-
mass...](http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/21/determining-the-mass-of-
comet-67pc-g/) seems accurate.

------
TomGullen
I'm curious to know, how far will the landing affect it's orbit?

~~~
flinty
are you thinking if we can potentially deflect comets?

~~~
TomGullen
Yep :)

------
netcan
This is exciting. I'm excited.

My reaction to this photo is a little funny. Basically: "Rocks! We have rocks
too! Yours look a lot like ours."

I have this desire to find things in common. Like flirting.

------
afoot
That single image is quite impactful if you know the background to the
project. It's like something out of a movie.

------
lostInComm
Ok this has been bugging me...

What is a "CIVA Image"? Everyone is using the term - but not explaining what
it is!

~~~
dennismp
I think its referring to this:
[http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/CIVA](http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/CIVA)

------
harisamin
This is pretty crazy and awesome!

