First ever Comet Landing: Live Feed

The European space agency's Rosetta mission will be landing on a comet, and broadcasting images. The landing is scheduled for 1700 Greenwich Mean Time, or 2 pm Eastern Standard Time.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/Live_updates_Rosetta_mission_comet_landing

I've seen enough hollywood comet landings, I'll be glued to the screen to see a real one.

Yeah me too.

Alternative live feed just incase there is any issues with the one Halfy has given-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/science-environment-29985988

Anyone else watching?

IL try to if nothing else decides to annoy me !

The lighting will probably be horrible. That at least is one thing we'll miss from the Hollywood movies.

What the fuck, they touched down already!!

Yeah I was just thinking if they want to keep people engaged in these things as live events next time they should put a bunch of drone cameras on there too and fire them off to get some interesting shots of the landing.

Yeah they landed already, 16.05 GMT but the pictures and the info arent in yet due to the time delay.

Did they even know where the dratted comet was? Hit it early? (Whoops) Pictures in an hour...better not show those early!

Or maybe with daylight savings time I was off on my time zone conversion. good thing I checked in. Now I have to friggin watch them drink champagne as I sit here dry 'cause technically I'm at work.

They need time to airbrush all the ufo's out of the footage!

Not all going quite to plan judging from the latest tweet-

'Philae sank about 4cm... but the harpoons didn't fire and the thruster problem was real and so it also didn't fire? Yow, the drama continues!'

If it sunk in 4 cm they may not need the harpoons. Unless they plan to do some drilling, which I suppose they might.

'The Esa Operations team confirms that the harpoons designed to attach Philae to the comet did not fire.
But they say the lander is in great shape, and the team is "looking at refire options".

Deciding whether to re-fire the harpoons is tricky - without the hold-down thruster, presumably @Philae2014 could recoil?- Mark Bentley, planetary scientist involved in the mission.


Also good to see so many prominent women involved in the project. Thats a good sign and a good message.

Still got some problems, not least that its on the comet but not attached. But still an incredible achievement just to get onto the damn thing given the distances involved.


'Scientists at mission control are now processing the first images from the surface of the comet.
But they are also getting intermittent drop-out in the communication between the lander Philae and the "mothership" Rosetta, still in orbit.
Paolo Ferri, head of operations at Esa, told BBC News: "We need to stabilise this situation over the next three hours."

But on the plus side- 'Mark McCaughrean, Esa's senior science adviser, has confirmed the lander's screws - if not its harpoons - have dug into the comet's surface.'

So hopefully it wont drift off too easily until they sort the harpoon issue out.

Why don't they have live running commentary? In America right now they'd have talking heads filling the waiting time, which sounds like a waste but it's better than just watching people mill around in mission control.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:
Also good to see so many prominent women involved in the project. Thats a good sign and a good message.

As I've said in the past, any science/math teacher will tell you the girls are just as good as the boys in these subjects, perhaps better on average. But they just don't visualize themselves doing these things, so don't go into them the way you'd predict based on school performance. Definitely, seeing the imagery of women involved in something like this is important. Imprinting begins young.

Finally - media briefing to start right now. They're running late.

They can land a probe on a spinning object a gazillion km away with pinpoint accuracy, but they can't start a friggin' news conference when they say they will?

I didn't realize they had started 3 years ago! Thought this comet was closer, but should realize near earth flybys almost never happen.

News conference didn't have any surface imagery, have to wait for the morning....

Loving that Bungo- boggles the mind that we sent a machine all that way to land on a comet. Mind blowing.

To help understand the gravity assist, think of a slow moving ping-pong ball getting in front of a faster moving bowling ball. It would bounce off moving faster than the bowling ball (otherwise the bowling ball would be running over it, not bouncing it). You may not think of gravity as serving the same purpose as a bounce, but so long as you don't look too closely the two processes are identical, and the same momentum transfer has to happen.

'so long as you don't look too closely'

The caveat of science!

All forces have to conserve momentum: if you look too closely at two balls colliding, you get into electrostatic forces, electron shielding and the like....all of which can be ignored if you don't look too closely and just conserve momentum.

With a planet and a satellite, you can get yourself confused looking at gravitational orbits in a moving frame, or you can just conserve momentum.

It's sort of like saying a wall is straight: helps you build the wall, helps you understand how to fit furniture along the wall; but if you look too closely you see bricks imperfectly aligned, and mortar bulging out here, indented there, etc. Generalizations are powerful, but you have to understand the parameters in which they are valid!