Congratulations To ESA

My twitter feed’s been exploding with tweets about the comet landing. Unfortunately, the harpoons apparently didn’t automatically deploy, so they don’t yet have a sure grab to the surface, which could make sampling operations difficult. The surface seems to be softer than expected. But they’re still working the problem.

This is good news for asteroid miners, though.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, hearing that they managed to anchor with the ice screws, so maybe harpoons are redundant now.

11 thoughts on “Congratulations To ESA”

  1. From reading the thread at NSF.com, it sounds like Philae may not be securely attached to the comet. It apparently bounced twice. If it’s in an area covered by fine dust, the screws may not have anything to dig into.

    That sort of cometary surface wouldn’t surprise me a bit. It’s reminiscent of the debate over the nature of the Moon’s surface in the early 60s. Some thought that a lander would sink into a thick layer of dust. That wasn’t conclusively disproven until the Surveyor landers.

    Nevertheless, I think we can call this mission largely successful. Congratulations, ESA! Even if they don’t get all the science they’re hoping for, they will have learned enough about cometary surfaces to design better attachment methods for future missions.

  2. What inquiring minds need to know:

    For the longest time, there was the Dirty Snowball hypothesis of cometary structure. That is, a comet is largely this clump of water ice with a lot of dust and a few pebbles mixed in. Arthur C Clarke makes this a plot point of one of his 2001 sequel novels, the ones in which the crew of a fusion-powered spacecraft need to replenish their supply of (water) reaction mass, they land on Halley’s Comet (yes, Halley’s) to shovel up some dirty snow, and their reaction drive leaves this glowing luminous arc because of all of the dust mixed in with the water-vapor plasma coming out the back end.

    Thing is, I stopped believing that yarn, dunno, about 20 years ago. One piece of data is that the spacecraft images of Halley’s Comet showed it to be very, very dark. Another piece of evidence is the C-type asteroids and the carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which are similarly dark. A third factor is simply the intuition that out in the natural world, there are never hard classifications but more often fuzzy continuums. In this case, there is not a hard boundary between where asteroids leave off and comets start.

    I got to be of the mind that the proper analogy to a comet is the depressing scene looking out my window in late winter at the street, where there are snow banks embedded with debris along with chunks of asphalt-rock conglomerate street littered about. I have been leaning to the comet being those chunks of rock that left behind all of the potholes. In other words, chondrites, things with embedded stones constituted from hydrated minerals, with some weathered organic compounds binding them together, with water soaked into the cracks forming ice. In other words, the comet is not the weathered snow, it is the weathered pieces of road surface being chipped out of the holes in the road and litering the gutter where the snowplow shoved them?

    1. C’mon. Besides the dude have tatoos completely covering both forearms, he was wearing this kind of short-sleeved shirt with cartoon images of slender women showing their body curves in skimpy bathing suits.

      It’s context. If this man looked like this after parking an 18-wheel rig at the Plainview Restaurant off US 41 just outside of Oshkosh, I don’t think any of the women waitstaff would take offense and refuse him service at the lunch counter.

      This space mission control center is a quasi-academic research environment. I wouldn’t dream of wearing anything like this to Faculty Senate, and it looks like this guy is trolling for the reaction that he is getting.

    2. When the last Mars probe landed the guy who had little stars shaved into his hair went viral and had hot women begging to have his babies. Perhaps there’s a method to the madness. In a room full of Wolowitz’s, the tattooed man is king.

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