
Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space hibernation - WestCoastJustin
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/ESA_s_sleeping_beauty_wakes_up_from_deep_space_hibernation
======
WestCoastJustin
> _Operating on solar energy alone, Rosetta was placed into a deep space
> slumber in June 2011 as it cruised out to a distance of nearly 800 million
> km from the warmth of the Sun, beyond the orbit of Jupiter._

Boggles my mind what a group of engineers can do. Make you wonder if our
industry's mind share being wasted on web apps and consumer gadgets because of
the profit incentive associated? Just seems like an unbelievable symphony of
fields all playing in concert, let alone having it all work as expected in
_production_! Probably the most stunning example of this was Curiosity's
Landing on Mars (the tethered landing blew me away!) [1].

[1]
[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/edl20120809.html](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/edl20120809.html)

~~~
erikpukinskis
Edit: I can see this is getting downvoted. If you have time, I would really
appreciate a response to go with the downvote. This is my heartfelt belief,
and if I'm wrong I would really like to be able to learn something.

> Make you wonder if our industry's mind share being wasted on web apps and
> consumer gadgets because of the profit incentive associated?

I find this sentiment strange. To me, your kind of excitement, which seems to
be pure joy over incredible engineering feats, seems nihilistic. There are
serious terrestrial problems happening right now. Massive environmental
destruction, humanitarian disasters. Even in relatively stable places like the
Bay Area I know many people who are teetering on personal disaster. These are
extremely complex problems and engineers have extraordinarily powerful skills
to help solve them.

I understand why people are captivated by things like comets and why they'd
want to attempt these extraordinary feats. It's exciting and fun and there are
few joys that can match doing something that's never been done before.

For that reason I don't begrudge anyone who chooses that kind of work. Earth's
crises are incredibly depressing and there's largely no glory in helping a few
people stay out of homelessness, or helping a kid get through college. It's
risky, demoralizing work.

But I don't really understand why a mission like this would be considered a
noble pursuit. Fun, sure. But not especially noble. Yes, basic space science
has some value to society in the long term. But we have a MASSIVE backlog of
basic science that is being unused. We have journals chock full of solutions
to problems that are going unimplemented.

Even something as simple as logistic regression, which has been around for 70
years, is vastly underused. People get excited about bayesian models and
neural networks and all this great research, but there's still a massive
backlog of problems that could be solved with a simple regression or an ANOVA.
There are no basic questions to solve, just the work of obtaining and cleaning
data, doing the analysis, and packaging it in a tool that people can actually
use.

You seem to wonder why more people don't take on extremely difficult
challenges on the edge of possibility. But I wonder why more people don't use
existing technical tools to solve the massive backlog of problems that are
being ignored.

~~~
lmm
Downvoted you for asking people to explain their downvotes, which I consider a
dark pattern.

~~~
rwallace
Talking about the general pattern, not this case in particular:

I disagree. A downvote is a signal, "fewer comments like this one please".
Sometimes it's obvious what that means, but sometimes it's not. In that case
it's perfectly reasonable to ask, what was it about my comment that you
disliked? A feedback signal is only useful if understood, and sometimes to be
understood it needs clarifying.

------
wpietri
Shameless proxy brag:

I volunteer for the Long Now Foundation. [1] One of their amazing efforts is
the Rosetta Project [2], a set of parallel texts and linguistic resources so
that future civilizations will be able to decode anything written today.

The ESA put one of the Rosetta Project disks on the space probe [3], so a
bunch of information about our languages is now way the hell out there. You
can think of it as very long term backup. [4] I'm really happy for the Long
Now folks today.

As an aside, I strongly recommend their series of talks. It's one of my
favorite nerd events in SF, and members can stream them live. The old talks
are also available via podcast.

[1] [http://longnow.org/](http://longnow.org/) [2]
[http://rosettaproject.org/](http://rosettaproject.org/) [3]
[http://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/16/wake-up-
rosetta/](http://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/16/wake-up-rosetta/) [4]
[http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-
backup/](http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/)

~~~
grey-area
Such an amazing project. I was really keen to order one of the disks as part
of what would ensure their survival would be ubiquity, and it would be a
lovely artefact to own, but it seems they gave up on mass production. Do you
know I'd they have any plans to reproduce them or has that been shelved
indefinitely? Perhaps if I wait 10,000 years :)

Wonderful to think of the disk out there on a comet though, forever circling
the sun.

~~~
wpietri
That's a great question; I want one of them too. I'll try to remember to ask
somebody tonight at their talks. But last I heard, the barrier was finding a
reasonably priced way to do it. I don't think they've given up, though; a year
or so ago somebody showed me prototypes in a few different materials.

~~~
grey-area
I'd love to know when they do manage to produce them for say $1000 rather than
$10000 - they should have a waiting list so that they can inform people who're
interested if they ever do manage to produce them.

~~~
wpietri
Ok! It looks like you discovered the thing I found out last night: You get one
if you become a lifetime member, at $10k.

They are definitely looking for ways to bring down the cost. I'll suggest to
them that they start a waiting list. In the meantime, I'd suggest you follow
the Long Now blog or the Rosetta Project blog. You can be sure that they will
mention a 10x drop in cost on both of those.

------
simias
I couldn't believe that wasn't at the top of the frontpage already. It's an
amazing feat of engineering!

Unfortunately it seems the previous submission didn't get a lot of love for
some reason:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091027)

Come on people, if something is hacker news worthy it has to be this!

~~~
eponeponepon
I'm with you. They sent it - a decade ago - into space, chucked it further and
further three (four?) times in a row, then shut it down and told it to drop a
line in three years but to work out where it was first, and it did so within a
one-hour margin of error.

I am impressed.

~~~
snirp
In all fairness, it was not completely shut down. The main computer and some
heating was left active. I do not think that time keeping was biggest worry.

That being said, a hundred other things could have gone wrong and mission
control would have had no idea that something happened. Meteorite impacts,
misalignment of the solar panels, software bugs, radiation damage and a faulty
wake-up sequence are just some things that spring to mind.

Bad thing is that most of these could result in the spacecraft not even being
able to send out a ping. Or any information that would tell engineers what
went wrong and how to fix it for future missions.

Imagine just listening to silence and not being able to find out if any of it
was your mistake.

------
lucaspiller
> In fact, given the almost negligible gravity of the comet’s 4 km-wide
> nucleus, Philae will have to use ice screws and harpoons to stop it from
> rebounding back into space after touchdown.

That sounds a bit like a mod for the game Kerbal Space Program (KSP). There is
a planet called Inaccessible which has an equatorial rotation speed greater
than the escape velocity. As such to 'land' you need to continuously be
thrusting towards the planet (as opposed to away to slow your descent) - or
just land at the poles.

------
jCanvas
Does anyone know they type of setup these probes have? Is it running a custom
OS on custom hardware or plain old Linux on a x86 processor?

~~~
dalke
Two MA3-1750s. See
[http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet98/SCHMIDT2.PDF](http://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bullet98/SCHMIDT2.PDF)
and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-
STD-1750A](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-1750A) .

No idea about OS.

------
vibragiel
In case you're curious how does one get a spacecraft from Earth to a comet,
here's an interactive 3D visualization showing all those nice gravitational
assists.

[https://util1.estec.esa.int/rosetta/where_is_rosetta/](https://util1.estec.esa.int/rosetta/where_is_rosetta/)

------
kartikkumar
So exciting! Can't wait for the Philae landing. Going to be a tremendous event
in space exploration. My post-doc position is going to be closely tied to
Rosetta and future missions to asteroids, so I'm hoping for the best!
Interplanetary missions in Europe have taken hits from cuts in funding and
various political problems, so this will be a great boost for the industry as
a whole.

------
shalalala
<3 the 1st contact it sent was, "Hello, World!" Perfect.

~~~
ctdonath
The most elaborate "Hello, World" program ever written.

------
obblekk
Wow! Anyone know how the hardware interrupt for the timer worked? Was it's
design different to guard against false signals triggered by radiation?

------
mrcactu5
> _Since its launch in 2004, Rosetta has made three flybys of Earth and one of
> Mars to help it on course to its rendezvous with 67P /Churyumov-Gerasimenko,
> encountering asteroids Steins and Lutetia along the way._

This is quite a feat of engineering. How did they compute the trajectories?
Most things if you throw them into space will never be seen or heard from
again.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's just math, not even a very difficult one. You need detailed data about
trajectories and properties of celestial bodies, and then it's just Newtonian
dynamics.

Play a little bit of Kerbal Space Program if you want to get a feel of it :).

~~~
snirp
Just a thought: will Newtonian dynamics not introduce a significant error over
these speeds and distances? I believe that Newton's physics are just a
simplification of Einsteins Relativity. I am obviously not a physicist, so I
hope somebody can straighten me out.

Also I am not sure that we know all the weights of the celestial bodies with
enough precision not the introduce an error while performing a 'slingshot'.
Rosetta has propulsion and my guess it that it can be used to actively correct
small mistakes in positioning.

~~~
claudius
You know the masses of celestial bodies relatively well from their observed
trajectories and it is not too difficult to include relativistic corrections
in your calculations (though active corrections using thruster will still be
extremely helpful).

I imagine finding the best trajectory in the first place to be the more
difficult and interesting problem.

(Not an ESA guy, just wanna-be-condensed matter physicist.)

------
maaaats
I always love these videos. The crew is so ecstatic and happy with their feat
(well deserved), and everyone is hugging each other. If only I'd gotten the
same response from my team when I deploy some software with success, eh? ;)

I guess what I'm saying is I'm a bit jealous of the team effort and
environment.

------
sp332
Here's an account by one of the team members who has been waiting 10 years for
this: [http://theconversation.com/relief-as-rosetta-wakes-up-but-
st...](http://theconversation.com/relief-as-rosetta-wakes-up-but-still-we-
hold-our-breath-22137)

------
acqq
Apparently "This website requires javascript to function properly" so it
doesn't even presents the text. Bad programming since without styles, the
whole text is actually HTML (and not dynamically constructed by JavaScript).

------
randomsearch
Check out this incredible animation of Rosetta's trajectory:

[http://www.esa.int/esatv/Videos/2013/12/Rosetta_s_Journey_B-...](http://www.esa.int/esatv/Videos/2013/12/Rosetta_s_Journey_B-
Roll/Solar_system_animation_showing_Rosetta_trajectory)

------
hrjet
Nice animation using WebGL which shows the location of Rosetta:

[https://util1.estec.esa.int/rosetta/where_is_rosetta/](https://util1.estec.esa.int/rosetta/where_is_rosetta/)

