At to today’s briefing (“an inflation of landings” haha) the science team talked about Philae’s battery budget, and how the system is engineered such that at points of low charge, the lander will shut down until the solar panels grab enough energy, at which point it will warm the interior of the lander and then begin recharging the batteries. So Philae has the potential to sit on the surface of the comet for some time, charging batteries, until it can awake to continue the science and possibly reorient itself with a variety of methods.
The question I didn’t hear today is whether the team is planning on using Rosetta to image the suspected resting point of Philae so they can craft a good plan for reorientation.
I tried to watch the briefings, but the livestream cut off all but the last fifteen minutes or so.
According to http://www.spaceflight101.com/play-by-play-philae-landing.html and what I think I remember from the landing briefing, Rosetta is bringing its high-res camera (OSIRIS) to bear on the landing site to try and help figure out what’s going on.
The ESA seems to be in no hurry to release images or data publicly, so no word whether or not that’s already been done, scrapped, or whatever.
Also, apparently there is some live data coming off of the lander, but it’s all batteries and temperatures.
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In their defense, that science team has probably spent the last 48 hours awake and agonizing over the potential pitfalls in addition to having to deal with the relatively short battery life of Philae. I’m sure they’re doing their best to tune the images, and I’m sure they’ll release stuff soon enough to the public.
The one shot I’m looking forward to seeing full-rez, it was shown during the briefing, is of Philae about 3 hours from landing and looking like a pea being flung at a Cadillac.
I’ve been using the Rosetta blog for my daily needs.
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Were you watching the live feed when they got confirmation of the landing? Those dudes all seemed like cool-as-fuck uncles that I wish I had. Don’t want to take the well-deserved focus off of ESA, but this landing has me a little bummed thinking about what NASA could have accomplished with all the money we have squandered on cancerous and endless war campaigns abroad. With that kind of money we could have towed the goddamn thing into orbit and built a theme park on it.
If you have any red/blue 3D glasses in your junk drawer, check this out. Anyone in the know that can photoshop that to include a scale model image of the lander in it’s accurate landing spot (if it is on the area visible in this image)? Click on the image for a much larger version.
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I had the feed going the whole time in another monitor. Hours of guys watching screens around desks first. My dodgy internet even held up.
I bagged that3d image a while ago. It’s a beaut’.
They also have a 3d model of the comet for download and play.
and I see someone’s converted in to a .stl for 3d printing.
http://repables.com/r/409/
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Okay, I’m now in agreement with you, mostly because I want to see this specific image but I can’t seem to find it on their blog or via google images:
I’d really like it without the red circle, too, but I’m sure it will be released in due time.
Thanks for the 3D model links, nice. I was really impressed by the first 3D scanning I saw (http://3d.si.edu), and am super excited to see the image libraries grow as more scans are completed. What does bagged mean, sorry, I’m an oldish guy…
Age is irrelevant. Slang is localised. Bagged means got. (I stuck it in my bag I guess?)
Some nice models on that site.
Awesome!
That really makes the compacted dust ‘bridge’ between the two nuclei stand out
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