22 ms·
Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet
- dz0ny 12y agoSource: http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-12176/#/gallery/17219 http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151...
- trose 12y agoThank you! It should be HN policy to not post paywall sites IMO
- davidw 12y agoWe post links to products that cost money, though, no? Journalists need to eat too. Usually it takes entire milliseconds for someone to post other links, anyway. Or you can always sneak around the paywall. In this case I don't mind an article that has a bit more science bias rather than 'mainstream', so the DLR link is nice.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago>In this case I don't mind // Just to confirm you've personally paid for access to this content?
- davidw 12y agoI didn't. I clicked on the German one, which I suppose I may have paid for in some tiny way, because I pay taxes in Europe. At least I'd rather think about that than people like Berlusconi and friends getting a hold of them. I subscribe to The Economist, and occasionally buy access to the Financial Times.
- Kiro 12y agoWhy do you ask?
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoWell the opinion that you "don't mind paying" for something only really means anything if you actually pay for it (or pay for something similar). If you "don't mind paying" but you're getting it free (eg via your workplace or some other way) then that opinion seems pretty void.
- ryanthejuggler 12y agoAs a convention, there ought to be a [paywall] tag appended to the title in these cases. IIRC HN already uses [video] and [PDF].
- dang 12y agoThanks; changed.
- ihnorton 12y agoThe underlying data here comes from the Ptolemy instrument, a gas chromatograph mass-spectrometer (ion trap, in this case) which can measure ratios of molecules in a range of 14 to 140 Da. (It might also be able to identify somewhat larger species by inducing fragmentation and measuring the resulting pattern of smaller molecules within the effective mass range, but I haven't found if this capability was included). Some more info here: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1937.pdf http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/1937.pdf and: http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/31445-instruments/?fbodylongid=896 http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/31445-instruments/?fbodylongid=89... The instrument has its own Twitter feed, of course: https://twitter.com/philae_ptolemy https://twitter.com/philae_ptolemy
- happyscrappy 12y agoApparently the data is from COSAC not Ptolemy. The drill deployed but did not get a sample. https://twitter.com/erichand/status/534413817040867328 https://twitter.com/erichand/status/534413817040867328 Edit: Changed Rosetta to COSAC.
- InclinedPlane 12y agoThe article very clearly indicates the data is from COSAC, an instrument on the lander. It also indicates that the sampling came from the "atmosphere" of the comet rather than drilling.
- ihnorton 12y agoIndeed, good catch - that wasn't in the originally-linked article and I completely overlooked COSAC when looking up the instruments. So here is some info on COSAC: http://www.mps.mpg.de/1979406/COSAC http://www.mps.mpg.de/1979406/COSAC It is also a GC-MS, but rather than an ion trap, it is a time-of-flight analyzer with a much higher mass range (up to 1500 Da in the widest mode). It is neat to have two mass specs on a single relatively small probe. They are intended to be complementary, as discussed here (briefly, PTOLEMY is designed to measure isotope ratios and the COSAC TOF is designed for organics as it can measure chirality with dual GC columns, and also with a much higher mass range): ftp://ftp.iwf.oeaw.ac.at/pub/schwingenschuh/ROSETTA_Konrad/Lander/ulamec2007-pdf-Capabilities%20of%20Philae,%20the%20Rosetta%20Lander%20-space-science-rev.pdf [edit: for anyone else interested in mass-spec, I found some slides with an overview of MS instruments on previous probes - I was familiar with several, but there have been many more than I realized: http://jfsm2012.sciencesconf.org/conference/jfsm2012/pages/C10.pdf http://jfsm2012.sciencesconf.org/conference/jfsm2012/pages/C...]
- christiangenco 12y agoOh interesting: > Once the rechargeable secondary battery has been warmed by sunlight again, Philae will restart and the DLR LCC team will take their places at the control consoles again. This is the first I've heard that Philae can wake back up. I was under the impression that it had no solar capabilities whatsoever, and that the battery was the only power it had available.
- trose 12y agoYeah the probe is covered in panels. The main issue is that it did not land where they intended and it is mostly in shadow. I am not a rocket scientist but... it looks like it will be getting closer to the sun as time goes on here so maybe the light it can get later will be more intense and enough to power it?
- Khao 12y agoThe main issue I read was that even though it gets some light (something like 1 hour of light per 12 hours) the battery can't recharge when it's cold. So Philae needs light to heat up the battery and only then it can start charging it so it needs a longer exposure to sunlight or it needs to be closer to the sun so it heats up faster.
- gerry_mander 12y agoI thought solar panels were more efficient when cold...
- simias 12y agoMost electronics are more efficient when "cold", but when we say that we mean "cold" by our earth standards, i.e. something like 15 degrees celsius. I think I read that Philae's temperature after landing was less than -160 degrees celsius. Getting anything to work at those temperatures is hard...
- RobotCaleb 12y ago
- mkriss 12y agoYou can access Wallstreet journal articles by searching title in google ( because if referal is from google then article is free )
- gtirloni 12y agoGoogle redirect without paywall: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCEQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Frosetta-probe-directly-discovers-organic-molecules-on-comet-1416256078&ei=TXZrVIfBEY3daLOOgeAN&usg=AFQjCNG59ouzNU_aXv7JBhhdGm4bBDCK5Q&sig2=0BaHL0tkVGarc5Hn7eEzNA&bvm=bv.79908130,d.d2s https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- ElHacker 12y agoThanks!
- piyush_soni 12y agoThanks. Just a note to others, if you have already opened the link 'with' the paywall, even this might not work. Just open this link in another browser.
- delucain 12y agoChrome's incognito mode is a good solution for this too.
- coldcode 12y agoTried it in another browser, doesn't work either.
- aftabh 12y agoInteresting. I'm able to read the article with Google Chrome but not Firefox (which I used first) browser. Edit: I opened the article in private mode in both Google Chrome and Firefox browsers so it cannot be related to browser's cache. Tried other news articles from WSJ website, got the same result i.e. they worked with Google Chrome but not with Firefox browser.
- grecy 12y agoWe hearing that hopefully when it warms up and gets closer to the sun it will wake up and start transmitting again. Do they have an estimate of when it will be destroyed because it's too close to the sun?
- jnevill 12y agoThe closest it gets to the sun is still outside the Earth's orbit (http://www.livecometdata.com/comets/67p-churyumov-gerasimenko/ http://www.livecometdata.com/comets/67p-churyumov-gerasimenk...)
- codeulike 12y agocomets go round the sun, not into it
- codingbeer 12y agoCorrect, but perihelion might be too close for comfort.
- privong 12y ago> comets go round the sun, not into it But that does not mean all comets survive their close approach to the Sun. Some, such as the sungrazing comets[0], come quite close to the surface and can be destroyed by their encounters with the Sun. As jnevill points out, this particular comet's orbit does not take it closer to the Sun than the Earth's distance from the Sun. The comet is on a ~6yr orbit, I believe, and so should survive for a long period of time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungrazing_comet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sungrazing_comet
- ealloc 12y agoPersonally I think the idea that life/prebiotic soup came to earth on a comet is suspect, for the reasons explained in these blog posts and the links therein: http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2011/11/nasa-confusion-about-origin-of-life.html http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2011/11/nasa-confusion-about-ori... http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/can-watery-asteroids-explain-why-life.html http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/can-watery-asteroids-ex... Two problems with the 'organic asteroid' theory are the 'racemization problem' (how to explain why life only uses L isomers rather than both the L and D isomers present in meteorites), and the fact that the amount of organic matter in meteors is tiny. Compare that to the opportunities for life to arise on earth in its diverse chemical environments. See the calculations by Jeffrey Bada discussed in the second link.
- nitrogen 12y agoIt's possible that there's no reason life chose L or D isomers, but choosing one and sticking to it was advantageous (I use the word "choose" loosely here).
- bduerst 12y agoAbiogenesis is one of those things where there is way more speculation than evidence. Some speculation says that it is because the molecular machinery maintenance to handle both would be twice as taxing for organisms. Of course, having the reverse isomer molecules would be advantageous against predators (who couldn't digest it) and a boon to natural selection. Like I said, plenty of speculation to be had.
- ludoo 12y ago"according to the German agency" I was under the impression it's a European agency...
- Someone 12y agoThe "Lander Control Center" is German (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Aerospace_Center#Current http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Aerospace_Center#Curre...)
- nkuttler 12y agoThe probe is controlled from Germany... but yeah, that statement is as vague as it gets.
- lispm 12y agohttp://www.dlr.de/rb/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-4539/ http://www.dlr.de/rb/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-4539/
- tormeh 12y agoYes, but the DLR is not. ESA isn't monolithic in the way that NASA is, I believe.
- oelmekki 12y agoYeah, my first reaction was the same, mentioning them in the top of article while mentioning all other contributors as a note in last paragraph felt like wanting to take all credit. But then I saw it was published on a ".de" website. You can expect it's targeted at a german audience, who naturally feels interested in knowing which part their country played into this (mentioning others just after wouldn't have hurt, though).
- codeulike 12y agoOrganic meaning, in this case, organic chemistry, i.e. stuff containing carbon. Perhaps hydrocarbons. But it doesn't mean 'life'.
- irollboozers 12y agoThe fact that exciting scientific discoveries like this are being presented on WSJ behind a paywall is absurd. Science on the internet is going to be dramatically different in 10 years than it is right now...
- jp555 12y agoYou think the people at the WSJ should work for free? I think that's absurd. Have you never attempted to read original scientific papers? Most are hidden behind paywalls. Search for yourself - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gquery/
- mrqwerty 12y agoNot true, or at least depends on the field. I am able to find 80% of the maths, physics, comp sci papers that interest me. I think reducing all human interaction into a measure of value is absurd - but there you go, each to his own.
- jonnathanson 12y agoIt's inconvenient for us, but I wouldn't necessarily call it "absurd." The Wall Street Journal is not a 501(c). It's either this, or a flurry of intrusive ads. (Or a subscription upsell, but I digress). Different publications pick their poison differently. But someone's gotta pay for something. Besides, paywalls aren't hard to circumvent. Someone usually posts a redirect within minutes of these articles' being linked here.
- irollboozers 12y agoSurely someone at WSJ is wondering "Hey, this article is doing really well in organic search. Our numbers are up, great job everyone."
- jonnathanson 12y agoI'm not a paywall advocate, fwiw. I think it's a suboptimal monetization strategy that often directly conflicts with distribution and UX. That said, I don't think it's ipso facto ridiculous. There are better ways to monetize, but not monetizing is not an option for WSJ.
- seccess 12y ago"Scientists are analyzing the data to see whether the organic compounds detected by Philae are simple ones—such as methane and methanol—or a more complex species such as amino acids" I feel like there is a big difference between finding methane and finding amino acids on the comet. Surely, finding methane isn't all that interesting.
- kileywm 12y agoIt would have interesting implications if it was produced by microorganisms. I don't know enough to comment further, but I'm guessing that's what the article was suggesting.
- fsloth 12y agoOrganic compounds are just molecules that have carbon atoms in them. You don't need anything that is 'living' to produce them. All life we have discovered on earth is based on carbon. So, finding these building blocks of life in space is interesting because it is solid proof you don't need to be on earth to produce them (something that might or might not seem intuitively obvious but in science you can't use intuition as proof, only as a guide). However, while making it a tiny bit more likely, it does not mean anything is alive out there.
- fsiefken 12y agoGlycine has been found on comet Wild 2, so chances are good Philae found amino acids.
- gus_massa 12y agoThe aminoacids (and even more complex molecules) can be formed without life when the UV-rays hit simpler molecules and they rearrange "randomly". For example, you can read: In dirty ice like comets: http://www.astrochem.org/sci/Amino_Acids.php http://www.astrochem.org/sci/Amino_Acids.php In interestelar clouds: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2003/aug/11/amino-acid-detected-in-space http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2003/aug/11/amino-a...
- dang 12y agoUrl changed from http://online.wsj.com/articles/rosetta-probe-directly-discovers-organic-molecules-on-comet-1416256078 http://online.wsj.com/articles/rosetta-probe-directly-discov... because that one is behind a paywall and this one is a more original source.