www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta

What it sais on the tin, they are broadcasting it live.



http://www.southwales-ev...517156-detail/story.html

The story behind it:

ESA reports that after performing a series of checks on the lander’s health, the Philae lander’s “active descent system” was found to non-operational. During the final phase of descent, the thrusters would be used to avoid what ESA terms “rebound” at the moment of touchdown.

“The cold gas thruster on top of the lander does not appear to be working so we will have to rely fully on the harpoons at touchdown,” Stephan Ulamec, Philae lander manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center told an early morning press conference. “We’ll need some luck not to land on a boulder or a steep slope.”

http://www.forbes.com/si...ent-to-cometary-surface/

Good luck. Hope everything goes well!

Oh nooo! Fingers crossed! www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

Touchdown!

Made it! Right on.

madness

The Project Scientist of the Rosetta mission, Matt Taylor, is an interesting character. I like his tattooed arms.





Also wearing this shirt in public while millions watch is ballsy.



Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

WOOOOHOOOO!!!GOOSEBUMPS!! What an incredible achievment! wow..

Yeah, we got a piece of metal on a space rock, more than 40 years after having the technology for getting to the moon.

What did the iraq war cost? 4000 billion or something around that? Immagine that kind of money would have been put into an space programe. A big orbital colony would be no problem, the moon could be visited regulary and studied by humans living there and we could be even close to a space elevator with that kind of effort.

Well, for the scientist involved, it must be a very happy day, job well done! It is after all a pretty tricky thing to intercept a comet with a probe. And maybe we learn a thing or two from it.

You know what nicita? You're absolutely right. Should we celebrate this occasion as an achievement or should we use it and its shortcomings as an illustration of what we could be doing?

One of the insights i received from hyperspace was summed up in a recent movie (see my review elsewhere on the board) by its main character when he quipped 'humanity was born on earth but we weren't meant to die there'. Moving into space,using the gift of our intelligence and mobility, so that this garden may perhaps thrive is the right hand path, the psychedelic way if you will. Spending untold amounts of gold on designing and using weapons with which to murder people far away from our homes and televisions is the other. One will take us into the future, one will destroy us.

That we made it through the cold war era and its nuclear proliferation is a miracle and i think some see it as a promise to ourselves that we are responsible enough stewards of life on this planet to not eradicate it. But when put like you put it, well, it's a matter of time.

I do see this landing, or attempted landing- last i heard nothing worked and they were afraid the microwave oven we sent to land on a comet was going to fall off (that's how the article i read put it, "fall off" a damn comet)- as an achievement, but what we COULD be doing...

I really like McKennas thoughts on this topic:


There is so much we could learn as a collective from building colonies in space and on other celestial bodies. We would have to establish closed cycles for producing and reusing everything that is needed to survive. And seeing the difficulties to sustain a human life in emptyness would certainly give a great awareness to the life supporting systems that we have on our piece of space rock: the terrestrial and marine ecosystems, the building of fertile soil from rock and plant material, the growth of beautiful habitat for all living things, the production of food, the biological cleaning of air and water, the production of oxigen... also the benefits of sustainable technology, using ressources in cycles, avoiding toxic material and waste, limiting ressource and energy consumption to the necessities. Technology needed for developing off world colonies would be beneficial for many terrestrial uses.
Maybe our civilization would learn to cerish these things again; protect and proliferate life on our homeplanet instead of spreading death and destruction and making an effort to build a truely developed civilization instead of a highly efficient industry of exploitation and military.
It is something that could influence every single life for the better.
I really hope to see this in my livetime, but I'm afraid it is more likely that I will witness the death of billions (provided I survive that long myself).

But back to the comet: It sings in very low frequency magnetic oscillation!
The song somehow really gives me shivers. It seems strangly haunting and alive.

So it looks like Philae the most sophisticated (or at least furthest travelled) remote control vehicle has rolled under a cliff edge out of the light so it can't get any solar power. Isnt that always the case!
On the bright side it looks like it will shield it from intense heat and may well wake up next year when it gets closer to the sun as they managed to swing it around before it ran out of power.

www.esa.int/Our_Activiti...ssion_before_hibernation