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Europe's Rosetta probe goes into orbit around comet 67P

234 points by NickPollard 12y ago

TomGullen 12y ago
> On 6 June 2014 water vapor was detected being released from Churyumov-Gerasimenko at a rate of roughly 1 litre per second http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen... I find that pretty amazing! That's a lot of water coming off one comet just being sprayed everywhere.
- robin_reala 12y ago
  The comet is pretty big. I don’t know if you know London, but this image posted on the BBC earlier put it into perspective: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586_rosetta_comet_624.jpg http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/76758000/jpg/_...
personZ 12y ago
I assume that it isn't actually orbiting the comet, but instead is just adjusting to follow the same orbit as the comet, right?
- FranOntanaya 12y ago
  That's correct. And because the orbit forces it to slowly overtake the comet, it needs to slow down periodically to stay at 100km of it.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    > That's correct. And because the orbit forces it to slowly overtake the comet, it needs to slow down periodically to stay at 100km of it. No, not quite. Remember, we're talking about a three body problem here so any intuition from two body dynamics doesn't really hold. The spacecraft travels 100km closer to the sun than the comet, but that's a very small fraction of the total distance. When you factor in the small acceleration from the comet body, we can no longer think of the orbit as being a slightly smaller orbit with a shorter period (and thus overtaking the comet). My best understanding is that the triangular "orbit" is to measure the mass and gravitational properties of the comet in order to orbit as well as scientific goals.
- arethuza 12y ago
  It's being described as a "triangular orbit" :-) "Rosetta will, follow, at least for now, a three-legged triangular orbit that requires a small thruster burn at each apex. The legs are about 100 km long and it will take Rosetta between three and four days to complete each one." http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/04/whats-happening-in-rosetta-mission-control-today/ http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/04/whats-happening-in-r...
  - personZ 12y ago
    What a fascinating, seeming convoluted (but clearly intentional and purposeful), flight path. Fascinating stuff, and it's amazing it has that much residual thrust available.
    - Sharlin 12y ago
      AFAIK they're only doing it for a while to measure 67P's mass and density distribution, so they can calculate a "real" orbit for Rosetta later (but it will still require regular adjustments due to the highly irregular shape of the comet).
    - Gravityloss 12y ago
      This is a good illustration. https://twitter.com/rowhoop/status/496920940539052032/photo/1 https://twitter.com/rowhoop/status/496920940539052032/photo/...
    - exDM69 12y ago
      > and it's amazing it has that much residual thrust available. We're not talking about propellant residue, that was very well planned ahead. The spacecraft carried about 1.5 tons of propellant at launch. That gives the spacecraft a delta-v budget that is several kilometers per second. The next thruster burns (on the triangular "hyperbolic orbits") will be tiny, in the order of centimeters per second.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    Here is a YouTube video from ESA demonstrating the orbit. It will be performing these small thruster (in the order of centimeters per second velocity change) burns to stay ahead of the Comet while doing fine measurements of the acceleration caused by the gravity of the comet. When the mass and mass distribution has been established, the spacecraft will eventually settle in an orbit about 20 kilometers from the comet and finally down to 10 kilometers. http://youtu.be/Mf1zsACcXc4 http://youtu.be/Mf1zsACcXc4
- Luc 12y ago
  It's moving under power in a trajectory around it at the moment. I would call that orbiting, even if it's not due to the gravitational pull of the comet. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25995-cometmapping-rosetta-spacecraft-prepares-for-duty.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25995-cometmapping-ros...
Sharlin 12y ago
I watched ESA's livestream this morning and they explained that Rosetta is actually just co-orbiting the Sun with 67P as of now. They're making it slowly drift to a few different directions and measuring the acceleration caused by the comet's gravity, so they can build an accurate model of the mass and density distribution of such an irregularly shaped object.
- jeroen94704 12y ago
  With the masses of the comet and the spacecraft being relatively close, it's hard to tell whether Rosetta is co-orbiting the sun or orbiting the comet itself.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    > With the masses of the comet and the spacecraft being relatively close No, they're not close at all. The comet is three by five kilometers across, and the mass is around 3.14 * 10^12 kg. The orbiter at launch weighs in at 2900 kg and the lander is 100 kg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen...
    - BtM909 12y ago
      I think jeroen94704 is saying "With the masses of the comet, and the spacecraft being relatively close" [comma added]
      - dalke 12y ago
        I disagree. At the very least it would need to be "mass" not "masses". The closest statement should be more like "With the mass of the comet, and the spacecraft being relatively distant."
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
yread 12y ago
You can watch the live stream here http://rosetta.esa.int/ http://rosetta.esa.int/ The detailed explanations and behind the scenes looks are really interesting, meeting such tiny piece of rock 400M km away is just crazy. Sometimes it's also funny (one of the scientists was showing a slow mo video with seemingly nothing happening "well, you got time, right? WE had to wait for 10 years") EDIT:it's over
- exDM69 12y ago
  > The detailed explanations and behind the scenes looks are really interesting, meeting such tiny piece of rock 400M km away is just crazy. What makes this even more crazy is that the space craft cruised 31 months powered down, from Mars to beyond the orbit of Jupiter and then back. The precision required to accomplish this is tiny! The mission controllers must have had a pretty good confidence before giving the ok to power down. Huge accomplishment and magnificent engineering. Hats off to the guys in ESOC and other ESA facilities.
  - levesque 12y ago
    Is the precision tiny or huge? :>
    - tormeh 12y ago
      I think "great" is the word. Tiny margins/tolerances, but not precision. Not that it really matters.
      - verytrivial 12y ago
        Even if it doesn't matter: "exquisite".
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - hexagonc 12y ago
    Physics: It just works (TM)
lotsofmangos 12y ago
This is the first step in developing the techniques required to sustain life in space without having to haul everything up Earth's gravity well. If we can get good at this, then it changes the entire economics of space.
- Narishma 12y ago
  What techniques are you referring to specifically?
  - NickPollard 12y ago
    I assume he's referring to harvesting of resources in space - e.g. comets contain large amounts of (frozen) water, so one way of getting water into space could be to send small spaceships up to harvest it from comets, rather than big spaceships full of water that is then costly to power up out of earth's gravity well. Of course, how you get that water to the target is another matter - getting it to a space station could be hard, but maybe you could pull chunks off the comet and send them crashing into, say, Mars. This might be a way of 'terraforming', to get water into the atmosphere, maybe even allow some of it to collect into small lakes, then you send some probes over with plants to start growing, bootstrap your way up.
  - exch 12y ago
    I am guessing OP is referring to the ability to reliably orbit and land on comets (and asteroids). We can use them for manned way stations or construction platforms. Not to mention mining them for whatever useful stuff may be in there.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      If we could show that comets have available surface water ice in the right form, then their gravity is low enough that you could plan to drill it off and melt it to be fed into water-ion thrusters. That would let you at the very least launch a mission which could study one comet, refuel, then slingshot away to a different target.
  - 12y ago
basicallydan 12y ago
This is my favourite part of the article: The mission gets even more ambitious in November when, after moving Rosetta closer to 67P, mission controllers will attempt to put the Philae lander on the surface. The lander will use harpoons to anchor itself and will carry out a series of experiments, including drilling into the material that makes up the comet. The mission aims to add to knowledge of comets and their role in ferrying the building blocks of life around the early Solar System. Harpoons. Very, very cool. I can't wait to find out more about this comet!
- arianvanp 12y ago
  And the obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1402/ http://xkcd.com/1402/
- vladtaltos 12y ago
  harpoons ;) yeah - http://www.xkcd.com/1402/ http://www.xkcd.com/1402/
Rapzid 12y ago
This is incredible.
ck2 12y ago
The probe weighed in at 3,000kg at liftoff back in 2004, with over half of that made up of propellant Wow I am starting to understand why they are so interested in that propellant-free drive. Does the comet actually have enough gravity to make an orbit happen or is the orbit completely artificial?
- hrjet 12y ago
  My guess: The probe won't orbit the comet, but rather orbit the sun in sync with the comet. That too would be artificial because the comet's mass and the probe's mass will keep changing (presumably at different rates). So the probe would need to catch up every once in a while.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  Bit of both. Rosetta will enter a hyperbolic orbit around P67 at 100km of altitude but it will have to use its thrusters on a regular basis to adjust its trajectory.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    Rosetta will eventually settle in a 20 km orbit around the comet tail. It will still have to use thrusters because orbiting an small irregular blob of melting ice and rock isn't going to work without precise maneuvering.
- exDM69 12y ago
  > Does the comet actually have enough gravity to make an orbit happen or is the orbit completely artificial? Yes it does. Rosetta is now at 100 km distance while they are trying to figure out the mass and the mass distribution of the comet (unknown at this time!), and will eventually settle in a 20 km orbit, finally 10 km, around the comet. This isn't going to be easy, see elsewhere ITT for some detailed discussion.
eps 12y ago
Rosetta project is incredibly inspiring. If you are ever stuck trying to name a variable, fire up your browser, look at Rosetta's trajectory and let the fact that it's a flawlessly-executed ten-year billion-kilometer plan to catch up with a fleck of rock in space sink in. Then go back to your coding :)
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  > Then go back to your coding :) How could I possibly?
- incision 12y ago
  >'Then go back to your coding...' ...where you imagine that you actually are working on trajectories - at Gattaca Aerospace [1]. (Great movie, one of my favorites.) 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- exDM69 12y ago
  If anyone feels like planning a trajectory like Rosetta's or, more precisely, writing a computer program to plan a trajectory, ESA's Global Trajectory Optimization [0] contest is for you. It's dubbed the "America’s cup of rocket science". The past contests and their entries are quite interesting, ranging from mapping the whole surface of the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa) or doing an asteroid hopping mission in the main asteroid belt. I might participate in the next one. [0] http://sophia.estec.esa.int/gtoc_portal/ http://sophia.estec.esa.int/gtoc_portal/
- ajuc 12y ago
  My friends at work proposed to have one of us each day doing nothing just helping others when they need a name for something. It's the hardest thing in programming, and the fact that we do it in foreign language doesn't help.
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
Video of the approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emhj53b-YOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emhj53b-YOI
sidcool 12y ago
I watched the news on BBC. They are right now in an orbit 100 km away from the comet and getting pictures of 2.5 mt resolution. In the next few weeks they will reach upto 30 km orbit and take more high resolution pics. The head of the mission mentioned about boulder like structures on the comet, origins of which is not knows. The comet also has vast plain areas, suitable for landing a probe. It will be by November when we get detailed results of the chemical composition of the comet.
- bergie 12y ago
  Photo of the surface: http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2014/08/comet_details/14710766-1-eng-GB/Comet_details_fullwidth.png?1407329750964 http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...
base 12y ago
Photo of the comet: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWJaVSIcAAVgZ9.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWJaVSIcAAVgZ9.jpg:large
tegeek 12y ago
I wish I could upload my brain to something like Rosetta & blast into the space, travelling around space bodies, planets & glaxies, gather the information & transmit back to space for the other Rosettas. What more it'll take to create an artificial intelligent life which can sustain herself almost everywhere?
- ojilles 12y ago
  Accelerando.
  - jarin 12y ago
    For those who don't get the reference, it's a fantastic book by Charles Stross that you can get for free from his website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
    - ojilles 12y ago
      Thanks for that link, did not know that was freely available! It's a blast to read.
flibitboat 12y ago
Wait.. I thought it said the live airing was happening at 13:00 CEST today?! did I miss it?! NOooo!!
soperj 12y ago
I feel like I'm in a new era where more people care about space again, but the reality is probably more that the "right" people care about space, so now more is happening.
- MrRage 12y ago
  When did this era start? This probe was launched 10 years go, and the planning must have started at least a few years before that.
  - soperj 12y ago
    after the 90s.
    - MrRage 12y ago
      Hmm so when were was there a lull? Serious question. I grew up in the 80's and although I don't check space news every day it doesn't seem like activity in space decreased in that time. All I'm really aware of is the loss in interest in, say, manned moon missions after Apollo 11. Are you talking about robotic probes?
      - soperj 12y ago
        Maybe it's the fact that I can actually watch all the launches now, and things are making the news. I'd never hear about the launch of anything in the 90s. It was all too mundane or routine to even get a note in the paper apparently.
owenversteeg 12y ago
That's a great article. The author said "invested" rather than "spent" a billion euros, I loved the visualization [0] of how big the asteroid was, and they kept the article not too technical as to bore the audience but technical enough to interest the more science-minded readers. [0] http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586_rosetta_comet_624.jpg http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586...

234 points by NickPollard 12y ago

> On 6 June 2014 water vapor was detected being released from Churyumov-Gerasimenko at a rate of roughly 1 litre per second http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen... I find that pretty amazing! That's a lot of water coming off one comet just being sprayed everywhere.

robin_reala 12y ago
The comet is pretty big. I don’t know if you know London, but this image posted on the BBC earlier put it into perspective: http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586_rosetta_comet_624.jpg http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/625/media/images/76758000/jpg/_...

personZ 12y ago

I assume that it isn't actually orbiting the comet, but instead is just adjusting to follow the same orbit as the comet, right?

FranOntanaya 12y ago
That's correct. And because the orbit forces it to slowly overtake the comet, it needs to slow down periodically to stay at 100km of it.
- exDM69 12y ago
  > That's correct. And because the orbit forces it to slowly overtake the comet, it needs to slow down periodically to stay at 100km of it. No, not quite. Remember, we're talking about a three body problem here so any intuition from two body dynamics doesn't really hold. The spacecraft travels 100km closer to the sun than the comet, but that's a very small fraction of the total distance. When you factor in the small acceleration from the comet body, we can no longer think of the orbit as being a slightly smaller orbit with a shorter period (and thus overtaking the comet). My best understanding is that the triangular "orbit" is to measure the mass and gravitational properties of the comet in order to orbit as well as scientific goals.
arethuza 12y ago
It's being described as a "triangular orbit" :-) "Rosetta will, follow, at least for now, a three-legged triangular orbit that requires a small thruster burn at each apex. The legs are about 100 km long and it will take Rosetta between three and four days to complete each one." http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/04/whats-happening-in-rosetta-mission-control-today/ http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/04/whats-happening-in-r...
- personZ 12y ago
  What a fascinating, seeming convoluted (but clearly intentional and purposeful), flight path. Fascinating stuff, and it's amazing it has that much residual thrust available.
  - Sharlin 12y ago
    AFAIK they're only doing it for a while to measure 67P's mass and density distribution, so they can calculate a "real" orbit for Rosetta later (but it will still require regular adjustments due to the highly irregular shape of the comet).
  - Gravityloss 12y ago
    This is a good illustration. https://twitter.com/rowhoop/status/496920940539052032/photo/1 https://twitter.com/rowhoop/status/496920940539052032/photo/...
  - exDM69 12y ago
    > and it's amazing it has that much residual thrust available. We're not talking about propellant residue, that was very well planned ahead. The spacecraft carried about 1.5 tons of propellant at launch. That gives the spacecraft a delta-v budget that is several kilometers per second. The next thruster burns (on the triangular "hyperbolic orbits") will be tiny, in the order of centimeters per second.
- exDM69 12y ago
  Here is a YouTube video from ESA demonstrating the orbit. It will be performing these small thruster (in the order of centimeters per second velocity change) burns to stay ahead of the Comet while doing fine measurements of the acceleration caused by the gravity of the comet. When the mass and mass distribution has been established, the spacecraft will eventually settle in an orbit about 20 kilometers from the comet and finally down to 10 kilometers. http://youtu.be/Mf1zsACcXc4 http://youtu.be/Mf1zsACcXc4
Luc 12y ago
It's moving under power in a trajectory around it at the moment. I would call that orbiting, even if it's not due to the gravitational pull of the comet. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25995-cometmapping-rosetta-spacecraft-prepares-for-duty.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25995-cometmapping-ros...

Sharlin 12y ago

I watched ESA's livestream this morning and they explained that Rosetta is actually just co-orbiting the Sun with 67P as of now. They're making it slowly drift to a few different directions and measuring the acceleration caused by the comet's gravity, so they can build an accurate model of the mass and density distribution of such an irregularly shaped object.

jeroen94704 12y ago
With the masses of the comet and the spacecraft being relatively close, it's hard to tell whether Rosetta is co-orbiting the sun or orbiting the comet itself.
- exDM69 12y ago
  > With the masses of the comet and the spacecraft being relatively close No, they're not close at all. The comet is three by five kilometers across, and the mass is around 3.14 * 10^12 kg. The orbiter at launch weighs in at 2900 kg and the lander is 100 kg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimen...
  - BtM909 12y ago
    I think jeroen94704 is saying "With the masses of the comet, and the spacecraft being relatively close" [comma added]
    - dalke 12y ago
      I disagree. At the very least it would need to be "mass" not "masses". The closest statement should be more like "With the mass of the comet, and the spacecraft being relatively distant."
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago

yread 12y ago

You can watch the live stream here http://rosetta.esa.int/ http://rosetta.esa.int/ The detailed explanations and behind the scenes looks are really interesting, meeting such tiny piece of rock 400M km away is just crazy. Sometimes it's also funny (one of the scientists was showing a slow mo video with seemingly nothing happening "well, you got time, right? WE had to wait for 10 years") EDIT:it's over

exDM69 12y ago
> The detailed explanations and behind the scenes looks are really interesting, meeting such tiny piece of rock 400M km away is just crazy. What makes this even more crazy is that the space craft cruised 31 months powered down, from Mars to beyond the orbit of Jupiter and then back. The precision required to accomplish this is tiny! The mission controllers must have had a pretty good confidence before giving the ok to power down. Huge accomplishment and magnificent engineering. Hats off to the guys in ESOC and other ESA facilities.
- levesque 12y ago
  Is the precision tiny or huge? :>
  - tormeh 12y ago
    I think "great" is the word. Tiny margins/tolerances, but not precision. Not that it really matters.
    - verytrivial 12y ago
      Even if it doesn't matter: "exquisite".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- hexagonc 12y ago
  Physics: It just works (TM)

lotsofmangos 12y ago

This is the first step in developing the techniques required to sustain life in space without having to haul everything up Earth's gravity well. If we can get good at this, then it changes the entire economics of space.

Narishma 12y ago
What techniques are you referring to specifically?
- NickPollard 12y ago
  I assume he's referring to harvesting of resources in space - e.g. comets contain large amounts of (frozen) water, so one way of getting water into space could be to send small spaceships up to harvest it from comets, rather than big spaceships full of water that is then costly to power up out of earth's gravity well. Of course, how you get that water to the target is another matter - getting it to a space station could be hard, but maybe you could pull chunks off the comet and send them crashing into, say, Mars. This might be a way of 'terraforming', to get water into the atmosphere, maybe even allow some of it to collect into small lakes, then you send some probes over with plants to start growing, bootstrap your way up.
- exch 12y ago
  I am guessing OP is referring to the ability to reliably orbit and land on comets (and asteroids). We can use them for manned way stations or construction platforms. Not to mention mining them for whatever useful stuff may be in there.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    If we could show that comets have available surface water ice in the right form, then their gravity is low enough that you could plan to drill it off and melt it to be fed into water-ion thrusters. That would let you at the very least launch a mission which could study one comet, refuel, then slingshot away to a different target.
- 12y ago

basicallydan 12y ago

This is my favourite part of the article: The mission gets even more ambitious in November when, after moving Rosetta closer to 67P, mission controllers will attempt to put the Philae lander on the surface. The lander will use harpoons to anchor itself and will carry out a series of experiments, including drilling into the material that makes up the comet. The mission aims to add to knowledge of comets and their role in ferrying the building blocks of life around the early Solar System. Harpoons. Very, very cool. I can't wait to find out more about this comet!

arianvanp 12y ago
And the obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1402/ http://xkcd.com/1402/
vladtaltos 12y ago
harpoons ;) yeah - http://www.xkcd.com/1402/ http://www.xkcd.com/1402/

Rapzid 12y ago

This is incredible.

ck2 12y ago

The probe weighed in at 3,000kg at liftoff back in 2004, with over half of that made up of propellant Wow I am starting to understand why they are so interested in that propellant-free drive. Does the comet actually have enough gravity to make an orbit happen or is the orbit completely artificial?

hrjet 12y ago
My guess: The probe won't orbit the comet, but rather orbit the sun in sync with the comet. That too would be artificial because the comet's mass and the probe's mass will keep changing (presumably at different rates). So the probe would need to catch up every once in a while.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
Bit of both. Rosetta will enter a hyperbolic orbit around P67 at 100km of altitude but it will have to use its thrusters on a regular basis to adjust its trajectory.
- exDM69 12y ago
  Rosetta will eventually settle in a 20 km orbit around the comet tail. It will still have to use thrusters because orbiting an small irregular blob of melting ice and rock isn't going to work without precise maneuvering.
exDM69 12y ago
> Does the comet actually have enough gravity to make an orbit happen or is the orbit completely artificial? Yes it does. Rosetta is now at 100 km distance while they are trying to figure out the mass and the mass distribution of the comet (unknown at this time!), and will eventually settle in a 20 km orbit, finally 10 km, around the comet. This isn't going to be easy, see elsewhere ITT for some detailed discussion.

eps 12y ago

Rosetta project is incredibly inspiring. If you are ever stuck trying to name a variable, fire up your browser, look at Rosetta's trajectory and let the fact that it's a flawlessly-executed ten-year billion-kilometer plan to catch up with a fleck of rock in space sink in. Then go back to your coding :)

pavel_lishin 12y ago
> Then go back to your coding :) How could I possibly?
incision 12y ago
>'Then go back to your coding...' ...where you imagine that you actually are working on trajectories - at Gattaca Aerospace [1]. (Great movie, one of my favorites.) 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
exDM69 12y ago
If anyone feels like planning a trajectory like Rosetta's or, more precisely, writing a computer program to plan a trajectory, ESA's Global Trajectory Optimization [0] contest is for you. It's dubbed the "America’s cup of rocket science". The past contests and their entries are quite interesting, ranging from mapping the whole surface of the Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Ganymede, Callisto, Europa) or doing an asteroid hopping mission in the main asteroid belt. I might participate in the next one. [0] http://sophia.estec.esa.int/gtoc_portal/ http://sophia.estec.esa.int/gtoc_portal/
ajuc 12y ago
My friends at work proposed to have one of us each day doing nothing just helping others when they need a name for something. It's the hardest thing in programming, and the fact that we do it in foreign language doesn't help.

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

Video of the approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emhj53b-YOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Emhj53b-YOI

sidcool 12y ago

I watched the news on BBC. They are right now in an orbit 100 km away from the comet and getting pictures of 2.5 mt resolution. In the next few weeks they will reach upto 30 km orbit and take more high resolution pics. The head of the mission mentioned about boulder like structures on the comet, origins of which is not knows. The comet also has vast plain areas, suitable for landing a probe. It will be by November when we get detailed results of the chemical composition of the comet.

bergie 12y ago
Photo of the surface: http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2014/08/comet_details/14710766-1-eng-GB/Comet_details_fullwidth.png?1407329750964 http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...

base 12y ago

Photo of the comet: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWJaVSIcAAVgZ9.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWJaVSIcAAVgZ9.jpg:large

tegeek 12y ago

I wish I could upload my brain to something like Rosetta & blast into the space, travelling around space bodies, planets & glaxies, gather the information & transmit back to space for the other Rosettas. What more it'll take to create an artificial intelligent life which can sustain herself almost everywhere?

ojilles 12y ago
Accelerando.
- jarin 12y ago
  For those who don't get the reference, it's a fantastic book by Charles Stross that you can get for free from his website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
  - ojilles 12y ago
    Thanks for that link, did not know that was freely available! It's a blast to read.

flibitboat 12y ago

Wait.. I thought it said the live airing was happening at 13:00 CEST today?! did I miss it?! NOooo!!

soperj 12y ago

I feel like I'm in a new era where more people care about space again, but the reality is probably more that the "right" people care about space, so now more is happening.

MrRage 12y ago
When did this era start? This probe was launched 10 years go, and the planning must have started at least a few years before that.
- soperj 12y ago
  after the 90s.
  - MrRage 12y ago
    Hmm so when were was there a lull? Serious question. I grew up in the 80's and although I don't check space news every day it doesn't seem like activity in space decreased in that time. All I'm really aware of is the loss in interest in, say, manned moon missions after Apollo 11. Are you talking about robotic probes?
    - soperj 12y ago
      Maybe it's the fact that I can actually watch all the launches now, and things are making the news. I'd never hear about the launch of anything in the 90s. It was all too mundane or routine to even get a note in the paper apparently.

owenversteeg 12y ago

That's a great article. The author said "invested" rather than "spent" a billion euros, I loved the visualization [0] of how big the asteroid was, and they kept the article not too technical as to bore the audience but technical enough to interest the more science-minded readers. [0] http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586_rosetta_comet_624.jpg http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76758000/jpg/_76758586...