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Rosetta: ESA’s ‘sleeping beauty’ wakes up from deep space hibernation

kartikkumar 13y ago
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.
simias 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
WestCoastJustin 13y ago
> 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
- hartator 13y ago
  Or maybe it's just a big waste of talents and money and we don't see it yet. We can believe people like Elon Musk will be the ones guiding humanity towards space conquest, not state programs.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    We can believe people like Elon Musk will be the ones guiding humanity towards space conquest, not state programs. We need both. The deep space research that's only possible with $1e9-$1e10 budgets has to precede scaling up and commercialization. Furthermore, there's little commercial incentive, even for people like Elon Musk, to invest in basic science research like Hubble, JWST, the LHC, etc.
  - mogrim 13y ago
    You can believe that if you like, but I'm sure he'd be the first to admit that his success is only possible thanks to the advances made in the Space Race, which was of course state funded.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      Playing Devil's advocate, the state just got there first; we can make suppositions, but it's now impossible to know if non-governmental entities could make such advances, since they're already made.
jCanvas 13y ago
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?
- welterde 13y ago
  Don't know about Rosetta, but at ESA LEON [1] is quite popular. But it is certainly custom hardware and a custom OS, because you need radiation-hardened chips (even for earth-satellites) and extreme reliability. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON
  - VexXtreme 13y ago
    Interesting. You'd think that a custom radiation-hardened x86 or ARM variant would be sufficient. Are there any space exploration vehicles running Linux?
    - TkTech 13y ago
      Absolutely! Hell, the ISS is all Linux now.
      - InclinedPlane 13y ago
        ISS laptops run linux, the ISS control software itself does not run on linux.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      Don't know about exploration, but SpaceX runs Linux for all it's rocket firmware and I imagine Dragon capsules will as well.
      - ddeck 13y ago
        There was as discussion with John Muratore (SpaceX director of vehicle certification) posted on HN a while back with some interesting notes on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834
shalalala 13y ago
<3 the 1st contact it sent was, "Hello, World!" Perfect.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  The most elaborate "Hello, World" program ever written.
obblekk 13y ago
Wow! Anyone know how the hardware interrupt for the timer worked? Was it's design different to guard against false signals triggered by radiation?
wpietri 13y ago
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/
- tectonic 13y ago
  I'd be interested in volunteering with the Long Now Foundation. How does that work?
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Email me! I'm glad to find out what needs doing and make introductions.
- grey-area 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
lucaspiller 13y ago
> 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.
vibragiel 13y ago
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/
maaaats 13y ago
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.
acqq 13y ago
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).
sp332 13y ago
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-still-we-hold-our-breath-22137 http://theconversation.com/relief-as-rosetta-wakes-up-but-st...
mrcactu5 13y ago
> 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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
    - TeMPOraL 13y ago
      There are people from ESA here, so I hope they can write about this in more detail. From what I know, Newtonian dynamics is good enough to move around the Solar System at the speeds we commonly employ. We've been doing gravity assists for some time now, so I guess this topic is mostly figured out, though probably some active corrections are required. Again, maybe the ESA guys will chime in. Or InclinedPlane ;).
    - claudius 13y ago
      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.)
hrjet 13y ago
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/
randomsearch 13y ago
Check out this incredible animation of Rosetta's trajectory: http://www.esa.int/esatv/Videos/2013/12/Rosetta_s_Journey_B-Roll/Solar_system_animation_showing_Rosetta_trajectory http://www.esa.int/esatv/Videos/2013/12/Rosetta_s_Journey_B-...

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.

simias 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

WestCoastJustin 13y ago

> 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

hartator 13y ago
Or maybe it's just a big waste of talents and money and we don't see it yet. We can believe people like Elon Musk will be the ones guiding humanity towards space conquest, not state programs.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  We can believe people like Elon Musk will be the ones guiding humanity towards space conquest, not state programs. We need both. The deep space research that's only possible with $1e9-$1e10 budgets has to precede scaling up and commercialization. Furthermore, there's little commercial incentive, even for people like Elon Musk, to invest in basic science research like Hubble, JWST, the LHC, etc.
- mogrim 13y ago
  You can believe that if you like, but I'm sure he'd be the first to admit that his success is only possible thanks to the advances made in the Space Race, which was of course state funded.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Playing Devil's advocate, the state just got there first; we can make suppositions, but it's now impossible to know if non-governmental entities could make such advances, since they're already made.

jCanvas 13y ago

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?

welterde 13y ago
Don't know about Rosetta, but at ESA LEON [1] is quite popular. But it is certainly custom hardware and a custom OS, because you need radiation-hardened chips (even for earth-satellites) and extreme reliability. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON
- VexXtreme 13y ago
  Interesting. You'd think that a custom radiation-hardened x86 or ARM variant would be sufficient. Are there any space exploration vehicles running Linux?
  - TkTech 13y ago
    Absolutely! Hell, the ISS is all Linux now.
    - InclinedPlane 13y ago
      ISS laptops run linux, the ISS control software itself does not run on linux.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    Don't know about exploration, but SpaceX runs Linux for all it's rocket firmware and I imagine Dragon capsules will as well.
    - ddeck 13y ago
      There was as discussion with John Muratore (SpaceX director of vehicle certification) posted on HN a while back with some interesting notes on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6125834

shalalala 13y ago

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

ctdonath 13y ago
The most elaborate "Hello, World" program ever written.

obblekk 13y ago

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

wpietri 13y ago

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/

tectonic 13y ago
I'd be interested in volunteering with the Long Now Foundation. How does that work?
- wpietri 13y ago
  Email me! I'm glad to find out what needs doing and make introductions.
grey-area 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

lucaspiller 13y ago

> 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.

vibragiel 13y ago

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/

maaaats 13y ago

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.

acqq 13y ago

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).

sp332 13y ago

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-still-we-hold-our-breath-22137 http://theconversation.com/relief-as-rosetta-wakes-up-but-st...

mrcactu5 13y ago

> 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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    There are people from ESA here, so I hope they can write about this in more detail. From what I know, Newtonian dynamics is good enough to move around the Solar System at the speeds we commonly employ. We've been doing gravity assists for some time now, so I guess this topic is mostly figured out, though probably some active corrections are required. Again, maybe the ESA guys will chime in. Or InclinedPlane ;).
  - claudius 13y ago
    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.)

hrjet 13y ago

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/

randomsearch 13y ago

Check out this incredible animation of Rosetta's trajectory: http://www.esa.int/esatv/Videos/2013/12/Rosetta_s_Journey_B-Roll/Solar_system_animation_showing_Rosetta_trajectory http://www.esa.int/esatv/Videos/2013/12/Rosetta_s_Journey_B-...