APOD: Descent to a Comet (2014 Nov 13)

[hlwelborn]

what is the artifact in the upper right corner?

[geckzilla]

what is the artifact in the upper right corner?

In the upper right corner a segment of the Philae landing gear is visible.

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/11/12 ... he-lander/

[Guest]

No worries. I just didn't want anyone to think I was being a downer about this exciting event. (I don't often quote from the classics.)

I didn't get the impression you did frequently and did get the sense of your offering.

How about that taking 2 hours to contact again after the 1st bounce of the lander?

[alter-ego]

Here's a pretty good update:
[quote="NY Times"]
...
Because of the failure of a thruster that was to press it against the comet’s surface after touching down, the European Space Agency’s Philae lander, part of the $1.75 billion Rosetta mission, bounded up more than half a mile before falling to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko again nearly two hours later, more than half a mile away. That is a considerable distance across a comet that is only 2.5 miles wide.

Philae then bounced again, less high, and ended up with only two of its three legs on the surface, tipped against a boulder, a wall of rock or perhaps the side of a hole.

“We are almost vertical, one foot probably in the open air — open space. I’m sorry, there is no air around,” Jean-Pierre Bibring, the lead lander scientist, said at a news conference on Thursday.
...
[/quote]

[Guest]

Looking at this image, I noted an lighter shaded oval shape between the 7 to 8 o'clock position relative to the center of the image, out on a fairly homogeneous 'plain'. A crater that size, on this object, seems improbable because such impact would have destroyed both. Volcanoes are out of the question, as in internal liquid leaking to the surface. Out-gassing, sublimation, etc. could not account for such a smooth edge. And nature hates straight (evenly curved) lines without cause. Leaving the question.... What is it?

[DavidLeodis]

Congratulations for what is to me an already very successful mission and to be honest one that I thought may not succeed even to land on the comet.

I am curious why this comet (and presumably others) has such a rough terrain as I would have expected its surface to have been smoothed out over its already assumed long life. Perhaps even tiny meteorite impacts help maintain the rough surface. Are there 'weathering' erosional effects in space .

[BMAONE23]

What I find interesting is just how rough and fragile looking the surface appears to be, almost like standing on volcanic glass. It is intresting to note that this particular comet surface is rather dark, rough and craggy and is similar to the hollywood imagined comet surface in Armageddon