First ever Comet Landing: Live Feed

How many light-seconds away is the comet? I'd imagine that the lag is too great to control the probe manually, but I'm curious how quickly they can send commands based on changing circumstances.

Oh yeah, and landing on a comet is very cool.

Spoiler:

Just eyeballing Bungo's video, it's on an elliptical orbit with one end at the earth's orbit, and the other end about twice mars orbit. But the current manuevers are happening about mars orbit. At closest approach mars is about 0.5 AU from earth, or about 4 light minutes. At furthest, it would be 2.5 AU, or 20 minutes. I assume they planned to get things as close as they could, so probably closer to 4 light minutes but not greater than 20.

Thanks, Halfy.

I think I heard them say during the live thing the delay was 25 minutes.

That would be out and back, which I neglected to realize, so between 12 and 13 light minutes away.

This is cool! Wish I had time to read up on it. I'm thinking they tried to intercept the comet as far away as practical so they can watch it "wake up" as it approaches the sun. The greater the range of temperatures you observe the more I'd think you could tell about its composition. That's just a farmer talkin' tho.....

How big is this comet supposed to be, anyway? It's apparently got significant gravity.

I think this picture puts it in perspective:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/anosmicovni/14677927249

(anyone know how to insert a flickr photo as an image? Just pasting the url doesn't work)

I've been a bit confused about references to 'orbiting' the comet.  I was assuming the 'orbiter' was just in the same solar orbit with the comet, rather than orbiting the comet itself.  May be wrong about that.

Good point about maybe wanting to watch the comet "wake up".

halfwise wrote:

That must have happened while I was busy harvesting.

A rough estimation of the orbital period around this comet would be in the tens of hours.

David H wrote:

halfwise wrote:

That must have happened while I was busy harvesting.

I guess bouncing around on a cranberry combine you might not notice the impact from a thousand miles away.

Here you go Halfy-

Ah see Dave sussed it out anway!

wow thats pretty big

Now if someone says a comet bumped off the Dinosaurs I can say.................ok !
Thats a big chunk flying about.

For those of us just joining, "comet landing" refers to us landing on the comet, not a comet landing on us.

I like to head off misunderstandings before they occur.

Yeah, yeah but it makes you re-think when stories are banded about of Comets crashing to Earth does it not ?

Yeah and add in that the bugger is probably moving at ridiculous speeds to

For me the eye-opener is how solid and rocky it looks. Sure, it may still be all frozen gas/liquid, (maybe it's only enough gas/liquid to hold the rocks together?), but it surely doesn't look like something that will just vaporize as it hits the atmosphere.

BTW, I wonder if it will start a new boot style?

its gonna be weird if they dont find lots of water because thats a pet theory if I am not mistaken. I think they are supposed to be giant seeding blobs, full of life making stuff.

Watch it be full of Vegemite.

Icy snowballs can still hurt. Just ask the Fjordlandians!

I just looked up comet 67p. It's got a mass of 10^13 kg ( that's 2,000,000,000 African elephants for Amarie ) and an estimated escape velocity of 1 meter per second, or 2 1/4 mph. So it is possible to have the mother ship Rosetta orbiting very low and very slowly. On the other hand traveling at a slow walk would put you into orbit...