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The European Space Agency may be loathsome tranzi-spawn, but this is so coolNovember 12th, 2014 |
 23 comments to The European Space Agency may be loathsome tranzi-spawn, but this is so cool |
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It is indeed “cool” that we can watch ESA Mission Control live (although, frankly, there’s not much happening at the moment). It is even more cool that they have successfully landed on the comet. I can’t wait to see the pictures.
It took a millennium of warfare to get Europe to cooperate like this. That’s an achievement!
Seeing as latest reports (as at UK 17.00) are suggesting the anchors failed to deploy, properly…
Sounds like a very €uropean endeavour.
They provided this really cool tool to track Rosetta’s entire trajectory. If I’m following it right they did slingshot maneuvers off Mars once and the Earth twice. And there are some good photos under the “Milestones” link, too.
If you printed all the EU’s regulations on A4 paper, and notionally stacked the sheets on top of each other, would that stack have reached the comet first?
When I saw this news, I thought, ‘Asteroid Mining.’
It is potentially very important, scientifically. If Philae finds organic molecules us exobiogenesis nutters will be very excited indeed.
Why the down? Assuming they recover the signal this is awesome and I couldn’t give a toss who did it. And ESA is not the same as the EU. Regardless Even getting it to surface is a Hell of a thing. Libertarians can be the most miserable of gits at time. And I find the term “Tranzi” repugnant for it is inaccurate.
Those millions spent on this could have been better spent on giving Daniel a government job! He could have been doing important work in collating how many bureaucratic files get filed per hour, or setting minimum and maximum filing standards!
Yeah, it’s a shame about the anchors. If they can’t get them working somehow they won’t be able to get a sample, which was really the whole point of the lander.
That’s space, though. A million things have to go right and one thing going wrong can wreck the whole mission.
This is the best commentry: http://xkcd1446.org/
It is a fantastic achievement, but the ‘comet-seeding Earth to create life’ theory simply displaces the argument about the origin of life to another celestial body being much like Earth in having a permissive environment for the creation of organic molecules, without explaining anything.
Perhaps they should have called the probe ‘Turkey’, after all it’s certainly ‘frozen’ now, it won’t enjoy Christmas and they could have announced ‘The Turkey has landed’, if that’s not an abuse of the verb ‘to land’.
This is, I’m sure, absolutely excellent space engineering. However, I doubt it’s as difficult as landing on Mars – which is mainly down to the issue of gravity.
In my view, the most significant thing is the success of the chase: the catching up and then adjusting to the same velocity. Latching on comes a close second – with (so it seems) coping with the failure of some combination of anchors and thrusters – so coping with multiple hardware failures, and with a communications lag measured in tens of minutes.
Unlike those looking for Earth life to have originated elsewhere than Earth, the big purpose strikes me as useful steps to avoid our Earth death (ie helping with diversion or destruction of a large asteroid on a collision course with Earth).
They (we) now just need to speed things up a bit, so it does not take 10 years from launch when we need it (as may well be necessary following detection of a new Near Earth Object) in the next few years, or even the next month.
Best regards
You take these little things I say much too seriously, NickM. Think of it as
In fact I must remember that for use as a title next time I write about Cool Things Governments Do.
Mr. Ed,
Yes, it simply displaces the origins of life to an earlier time and a completely different environment. Hardly makes any difference at all.
But you would not be likely to have any evidence of a completely different environment. Different from which environment? Two unknowns.
Ooh, I hope this is true.
Mr. Ed,
You have completely misunderstood the hypothesis. It is not that comets carried life from planet to planet, but that life or its precursors got started on the stuff the planets condensed out of. This would neatly solve some origin of life problems while at the same time suggesting that we might find life elsewhere in the solar system (e.g. Europa) and that it would have a good chance of being related to life on Earth.
Roue,
I don’t think that I have misunderstood anything. Have you a reference for the theory, e.g. Fred Hoyle or someone else?
Citing comets as a source of life strikes me as simple speculation, apparently unverifiable until this week anyway.
So do I, Laird. Take this, for example:
It may just be me, but I really wish I had a good reason not to think that.
Mr. Ed
The ESA went to a comet for the sheer fun of it. Don’t worry about it.
Now that Philae has gone silent I’m sure it’s a government conspiracy to conceal all the alien artifacts they found on that alleged “comet”!
I suspect its disgorging QE and the ACA to kickstart a ‘civilisation’.