Rosetta spacecraft landing on comet now

[Kildonan]

http://new.livestream.com/ESA/cometlanding

The lander has separated from the orbiter craft and is on its way down to land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency has a livestream of the control room (link above) the lander should touch down in less than an hour from now

 

[Kildonan]

If you were unable to follow it. The lander has sent back telemetry indicating a safe landing

Woohoo

 

[Kildonan]

 

[Kildonan]

 

[Kildonan]

The comet itself is a binary object with a larger flatter body which is melded to a smaller rounder body.
It is unsure if these bodies have merged together through accretion or is the remains of a much larger body which has been torn apart after sustaining impact or enormous gravitational forces from the Sun or Jupiter or other large body.

 

[hayes]

Where is the comet?

 

[Kildonan]

Some perspective on size of comet

 

[Kildonan]

Where is the comet?

The comet is 28 light minutes away. It took ten years for the spaceship to accumulate enough speed to reach to comet and place itself in orbit.

Rosetta followed a complex path which included several orbits around the Sun and the Earth and even once past Mars using the gravity of each close pass to sling shot itself faster and faster into an intercept orbit

 

[Jack Stevens]

Can Rosetta come out the deep sleep by charging its batteries, or is that it?

 

[Kildonan]

Link

The landing craft, dubbed Philae, returned all of its housekeeping data, as well as science data from the targeted instruments, including ROLIS, COSAC, Ptolemy, SD2 and CONSERT. This completed the measurements planned for the final block of experiments on the surface.

In addition, the lander’s body was lifted by about 4 cm and rotated about 35° in an attempt to receive more solar energy. But as the last science data fed back to Earth, Philae’s power rapidly depleted.

“It has been a huge success, the whole team is delighted,” said Stephan Ulamec, lander manager at the DLR German Aerospace Agency, who monitored Philae’s progress from ESA’s Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, this week.

“Despite the unplanned series of three touchdowns, all of our instruments could be operated and now it’s time to see what we’ve got.”

Against the odds – with no downwards thruster and with the automated harpoon system not having worked – Philae bounced twice after its first touchdown on the comet, coming to rest in the shadow of a cliff on Wednesday 12 November at 17:32 GMT (comet time – it takes over 28 minutes for the signal to reach Earth, via Rosetta).

“We still hope that at a later stage of the mission, perhaps when we are nearer to the Sun, that we might have enough solar illumination to wake up the lander and re-establish communication, ” added Stephan.

From now on, no contact will be possible unless sufficient sunlight falls on the solar panels to generate enough power to wake it up. The possibility that this may happen later in the mission was boosted when mission controllers sent commands to rotate the lander’s main body with its fixed solar panels. This should have exposed more panel area to sunlight.

Meanwhile, the Rosetta orbiter has been moving back into a 30 km orbit around the comet.

It will return to a 20 km orbit on 6 December and continue its mission to study the body in great detail as the comet becomes more active, en route to its closest encounter with the Sun on 13 August next year.

Over the coming months, Rosetta will start to fly in more distant ‘unbound’ orbits, while performing a series of daring flybys past the comet, some within just 8 km of its centre.

Data collected by the orbiter will allow scientists to watch the short- and long-term changes that take place on the comet, helping to answer some of the biggest and most important questions regarding the history of our Solar System. How did it form and evolve? How do comets work? What role did comets play in the evolution of the planets, of water on the Earth, and perhaps even of life on our home world.

“The data collected by Philae and Rosetta is set to make this mission a game-changer in cometary science,” says Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.

Fred Jansen, ESA’s Rosetta mission manager, says, “At the end of this amazing rollercoaster week, we look back on a successful first-ever soft-landing on a comet. This was a truly historic moment for ESA and its partners. We now look forward to many more months of exciting Rosetta science and possibly a return of Philae from hibernation at some point in time.”

 

[Kildonan]

Can Rosetta come out the deep sleep by charging its batteries, or is that it?

On 13 June 2015 at 20:28 UTC, ground controllers received an 85-second transmission from Philae, forwarded by Rosetta, indicating that the lander was in good health and had sufficiently recharged its batteries to come out of safe mode.[18][57] Philae sent historical data indicating that although it had been operating earlier than 13 June 2015, it had been unable to contact Rosetta before that date.[18] The lander reported that it was operating with 24 watts of electrical power at −35 °C (−31 °F).[57]

A new contact between Rosetta and Philae was confirmed on 19 June 2015.[58] The first signal was received on the ground from Rosetta at 13:37 UTC, while a second signal was received at 13:54 UTC. These contacts lasted about two minutes each and delivered additional housekeeping and status data.[58] By 26 June 2015, there had been a total of seven intermittent contacts between the lander and orbiter.[59] There are two opportunities for contact between the two spacecraft each Earth day, but their duration and quality depends on the orientation of the transmitting antenna on Philae and the location of Rosetta along its trajectory around the comet. Similarly, as the comet rotates, Philae is not always in sunlight and thus not always generating enough power via its solar panels to receive and transmit signals. ESA controllers are still working towards establishing a stable contact duration of at least 50 minutes.[59]

As of June 2015[update], Philae‍‍ '‍s key remaining experiment was to drill into the comet's surface to determine its chemical composition.[64]

Ground controllers sent commands to power up the CONSERT instrument on 5 July 2015, but received no immediate response from the lander. Confirmation was eventually received on 9 July, when the lander transmitted measurement data from the instrument.[65][dated info]

The European Space Agency (ESA), which is leading a consortium that includes NASA, announced that the mission to explore Comet 67P has discovered 16 organic compounds, described as "carbon and nitrogen-rich."

The agency says on its website that the discovery, made by the Philae lander includes four compounds that have never before been detected in comets.
And it adds that some of the compounds "play a key role in the prebiotic synthesis of amino acids, sugars ... the ingredients for life."
"For example, formaldehyde is implicated in the formation of ribose, which, ultimately features in molecules like DNA.

"The existence of such complex molecules in a comet, a relic of the early Solar System, imply that chemical processes at work during that time could have played a key role in fostering the formation of prebiotic material," it says.

Commenting on the findings, lander system engineer Laurence O'Rourke told CNN it was an important discovery. "If you apply energy to such organic compounds ... like a comet hitting a planet ... it could lead to the creation of amino acids which make up proteins, which are the basis of life itself," he said.

 

[hayes]

So awesome. Still amazed that we can do stuff like this.