Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Do harpoons work on comets?

Golly, what an exciting afternoon! Double screen time with both twitter and live feed open.

Congrats to the Rosetta and Philae team for the (possibly bouncy) landing!

Loved the comic strip updates from the web comic xkcd as shown above - which have already been converted into an animated gif. And we still don't know whether harpoons work on comets.

Can't wait to see what pictures get released tomorrow.

Fingers still crossed, just in case.


Updated: Philae on the way down:


Where Philae should be and where it looks like it ended up after two bounces, one of around 1 km (from here).

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4 comments:

  1. Tillerman8:39 pm

    We live in exciting times.

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  2. JP9:43 am

    Dan Snow pointed out that Rosetta was launched in those dark days before we had iPhones, twitter etc

    Golly.

    And now we have the rich experience that is twitter tag #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant ...

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  3. Tillerman1:57 pm

    Apparently harpoons don't work on comets.

    I read today that the team is trying to work out whether it will be safe to drill for samples or whether that might dislodge the untethered, unanchored lander from the comet. Looking forward to hearing the TV commentators explaining the difference between weight and mass and how that plays into this question.

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  4. JP2:42 pm

    I don't think they actually fired so we still don't know if harpoons work on comets or not.

    I think I heard that Philae's weight on 67P is around 1 gram

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