ESA Space Probe "Rosetta" Has Reached Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

[Black_Jesus]

So why are they fukking with this comet?

 

[Hawaiian Punch]

So why are they fukking with this comet?

http://news.yahoo.com/week-humanity-land-comet-first-time-183044920.html

Experts are calling it one of the greatest space explorations of our lifetime. It could be key to figuring out exactly how the solar system works, and even how the heck we all got here.

Funny quote I read in yahoo comments in the same article

Science can fly a machine to a comet but all religion can do is fly aeroplanes into buildings.

 

[Chris.B]

incredible

 

[str8up]

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

going to be a livestream

 

[Hawaiian Punch]

Touchdown

One small step for brehs, one giant leap for bed wenches

http://m.nydailynews.com/news/world...e-comet-67p-historic-effort-article-1.2007884

Rosetta lander Philae successfully lands on comet 67P
An unmanned spacecraft, in a history-making moment that was 10 years in the making, successfully landed Wednesday on the surface of a speeding comet in outer space.

The 220-pound Philae, dispatched by the European Space Agency, touched down at 11:03 a.m. on the icy surface of the 67P/Churyumov/Gerasimenko comet, officials announced.

“We are sitting on the surface and Philae is talking to us,” said project manager Stephan Elamec. “We are on the comet!”

William Shatner, the fictional “Star Trek” captain, was among those watching eagerly as Philae landed on a mass of dirty ice, gas and dust moving at 41,000 miles per hour.

“Touchdown confirmed,” Shatner retweeted after the landing.

The landing craft Philae was dispatched from the Rosetta, the spacecraft launched in March 2004 to begin the ambitious project.

After zipping around the Earth three times and once around Mars, Rosetta had achieved the velocity needed to catch the speeding comet.

ESA/ESA via Getty ImagesThe effort has been an epic undertaking, but could pay off Wednesday if the lander makes contact with the comet.
The two were traveling together for the last three months until Wednesday’s landing.

It took 28 minutes for the team in Darmstadt, Germany, to confirm the successful landing — the amount of time it took Philae’s signal to reach Earth from its current location about 311 million miles away.

The craft is equipped with 10 instruments to take pictures of the comet and to retrieve samples from below its surface.

The head of the ESA crowed a bit about reaching the comet ahead of the folks at NASA.

“We are the first to have done that, and that will stay forever,” said director-general Jean-Jacques Dordain.

Scientists are hopeful of learning about the creation of the solar system by studying the comet.

Klim Churyumov, one of the two astronomers who discovered the comet in 1969, said researchers can now examine whether comets provided the water and organic matter responsible for life on Earth.

The icy bodies date back 4.6 billion years.

With News Wire Services

lmcshane@nydailynews.com

 

[PewPew]

This is a great moment in time!

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

So why are they fukking with this comet?

To let other nations know that the USA runs this shyt.

Next step is extracting rare materials if there are any.

And further, imagine this.

If we can send a robot to a fukking comet, we can send them boys to your front door to handle bidness. Brrrrrrrraaaatttttt!!!

 

[Type Username Here]

To let other nations know that the USA runs this shyt.

Next step is extracting rare materials if there are any.

And further, imagine this.

If we can send a robot to a fukking comet, we can send them boys to your front door to handle bidness. Brrrrrrrraaaatttttt!!!

This is a European mission, not American

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

This is a European mission, not American

Precisely



Keep believing that

 

[Type Username Here]

Precisely



Keep believing that

Clown.

 

[Hawaiian Punch]

Man last night following the events of the philae lander on twitter?

It was like a movie when the probe reestablished contact and beamed back science data. This was a monumental success and giant leap for mankind and u don't eem no it


http://news.yahoo.com/low-battery-comet-probe-alive-uploading-data-esa-224233729.html

Comet probe sends back science treasure in final hours
Paris (AFP) - Europe's science probe Philae sent home a treasure trove of data from a comet heading towards the Sun before falling silent as its power ran out, mission control said Saturday.

Crowning a historic feat, the robot lab streamed data from its experiments back to its mother ship Rosetta in the final hours before its battery ran down.

This included the outcome of an eagerly-waited chemistry test of a sample drilled from the comet's icy and dusty surface, scientists said.

"Rosetta’s lander has completed its primary science mission," the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

Lacking power, its instruments and most systems went into standby mode after three days of non-stop work, sending back data that will keep scientists busy for years.

"The data collected by Philae and Rosetta is set to make this mission a game-changer in cometary science," said Matt Taylor, Rosetta project scientist.

Philae had landed in a dark shadow after a bouncy triple touchdown Wednesday.

It did not get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries sufficiently to extend its mission beyond its initial 60-hour work programme.

Mission engineers do not rule out making contact with the lander in the coming months as Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves closer to the Sun.

Conceived more than 20 years ago, the Rosetta mission aims at shedding light on the origins of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago, and maybe even life on Earth.

A theory gaining ground in astrophysics is that the fledgling Earth was pounded by these bodies of cosmic ice and carbon-rich dust, seeding our planet with the basics to start life.

Rosetta and its payload travelled more than six billion kilometres (3.75 billion miles), racing around the inner Solar System before they caught up with the comet in August this year.

On Wednesday, Philae bade farewell to its mother ship and descended to a comet travelling at 18 kilometres (11 miles) per second, 510 million kilometres (320 million miles) from Earth.

The touchdown did not go entirely as planned -- hardly a surprise in an operation some gloomily predicted had only a one-in-two chance of success.

Philae landed smack in the middle of its targeted site, but a pair of anchoring harpoons failed to deploy.

It rebounded, touched down again, bounced up once more and then landed for the third time at a place believed to be about a kilometre (half a mile) from the landing site.

Philae found itself in the shadow of a cliff, tilted at an angle that left one of its three legs pointed to the sky.

Weighing 100 kilos (220 pounds) on Earth, Philae has a mass of just one gramme (0.03 of an ounce) -- less than a feather -- on the low-gravity, four-kilometre comet.

That meant just a jolt could have caused it to drift off into space.

And lack of sunlight for its solar panels meant it had to survive on a battery with a charge of around 60 hours, enough to carry out its scheduled scientific work.

- Race against time -

Stacked against the odds, the scientists resorted to every trick possible to use power miserly and keep Rosetta working without causing it to drift away.

Using the lander's toolkit of 10 instruments, they started with passive observation -- taking pictures, measuring the comet's density, temperature, and internal structure, "sniffing" molecules of gas from its surface -- that would not move the craft.

Finally, in the most important but riskiest experiment of all, they drilled a core of material out of the comet surface to analyse its chemical signature.

All the data had to be stored and dispatched back to Rosetta as the power indicators shrank towards the red zone.

"We received everything," mission scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring told AFP. "The word is 'fabulous,' just 'fabulous.'

The team's eagerly-awaited first report will be made at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco next month.

The "67P" comet is due to loop around the Sun next year, flaring gas from its head and leaving a spectacular icy trail of ice from water stripped from its surface.

Rosetta will escort it until the comet heads back out towards the depths of the Solar System in December 2015.

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

So why are they fukking with this comet?

To let other nations know that the USA runs this shyt.

Next step is extracting rare materials if there are any.

And further, imagine this.

If we can send a robot to a fukking comet, we can send them boys to your front door to handle bidness. Brrrrrrrraaaatttttt!!!

This is a European mission, not American

Precisely



Keep believing that

Clown.