Philae comet lander wakes up

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33126885

by DangerousPie • 11 years ago

922 93 11 years ago

bbc.co.uk

orf• 11 years ago

When I'm feeling particularly melancholy I tell myself that none of the apps I've made are ever going to outlive me, and they really don't matter in the scheme of things.

But this... this is cool. Someone somewhere has programmed that lander so that it's able to not only able to locate earth (whilst hurtling through god knows where on a big rock) but also successfully re-establish communications. Those developers must be having a good day today, finally seeing their work come to fruition.

pja• 11 years ago

I believe the lander is communicating via the Rosetta probe which is relaying its data to earth. (This design meant that Philea needs to dedicate very little power to radio transmissions.) It’s still awesome though :)

kartikkumar2• 11 years ago

Wowoweeeee! This is FANTASTIC news! One of the few times that I have felt like typing in all caps. Incredible news and a testament to the survivability of space hardware. It'll be interesting to see how quickly they can triangulate Philae's true position to better understand the amount of incident light reaching the solar panels. It'll also be interesting to see how much of the payload has survived. Any more data would be of huge scientific value!

Definitely made my day! :)

EDIT: fixed typo

aaggarwal4• 11 years ago

Yes, amazing news, I am waiting for more data to come in to analyze the comet surface and the condition of the lander. This is obviously one the biggest achievement of modern space missions and ESA.

kartikkumar2• 11 years ago

Here's a little bit more info on the nature of the signal received: http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/06/14/rosettas-lander-phil...

24W is pretty good. More data on the instrumentation onboard can be found in DLR's fact sheet [1]. So I'm guessing if the hardware has survived, we should see some more science data trickling in. Fingers crossed!

[1] http://www.dlr.de/dlr/Portaldata/1/Resources/documents/Phila...

aidanhs• 11 years ago

Also an impressive achievement on the software side of things - no room for showstopper bugs here! It's not quite as simple as taking it offline, deploying some new code and starting it up again.

Is there any information on the processes used to have such a high level of confidence in the software? Lots of simulation? Relatedly, it might also be interesting to see a list of 'known bugs' and ways they've been worked around.

JohnHammersley• 11 years ago

Woo hoo! What amazing news, especially given the difficulties during the landing.

For those who didn't see the original coverage, you can see some brilliant photos of the bounce the lander made during it's landing on the comet here: http://www.space.com/27788-philae-comet-landing-bounce-photo...

Also a hat tip to the earlier missions (such as the Beagle probe that was lost on Mars) which emphasized the importance of retaining radio contact for as long as possible during landing and being able to send and receive commands with the minimum amount of hardware reconfiguration once landed.

What a fantastic start to Sunday!

benihana• 11 years ago

Oh my goodness I cannot image the excitement the Philae team must feel at having their baby phone home. Congratulations! Woohooo!! This is so awesome!

deepnet3• 11 years ago

With any luck we will have livestream of a comet entering Perihelion from the surface.

This is potentially the space mission of the Century.

More surface data is going to change what we know about Solar System formation.

Looks like Philae awoke earlier and has accumulated 8000 data packets for transmission to Earth, via Rosetta - fingers crossed for more surface photos later today :D

Coupled with Matt Taylor's seat of the pants trajectories through the tail and coma, solar panels buffeted by highly turbulent solar wind - this is going to be a super exciting science adventure.

Now we have located Philae, CONSERT'S volumetric map of the comet interior will find out the interior structure and hopefully resolve the contact-binary question.

That is if the tidal forces of Jupiter don't tear 67P apart.

ginko• 11 years ago

This is potentially the space mission of the Century.

I would really hope it isn't.

deepnet3• 11 years ago

space mission of the Century , so far...

Arnt• 11 years ago

A livestream from a comet, with a 24W power budget?

VLM• 11 years ago

Depends on your definition of stream...

http://isee3.p3s.nl/philae/

So 40 minutes ago the main structure was at +9.17C. Not exactly high def video but still kinda cool.

Please don't "hacker news effect" the poor server. But yeah, live streaming data...

geoffbrown• 11 years ago

YESSSSSS!!!!

danso• 11 years ago

Does anyone have any insight on what the team does while waiting for the lander to wake up? Or in these past months when it wasn't sure if Philae had successfully landed? I know in movies the team would be depicted as hunching over blinking consoles 24/7 and tapping keys furiously until something happened...but how is the team organized to work in the long haul? Are there a few scientists and engineers devoted to the operational status of the lander, while the rest work on examining past data that it has sent? Or they're working on researching the next prototype lander?

M2Ys4U• 11 years ago

Well Rosetta was still operational orbiting the comet and they always hoped that Philae would wake up again, I doubt they would have transferred any significant number of people to other projects.

nerd_stuff• 11 years ago

A couple of things come to mind, though I'm speculating.

Operations: Rosetta and Philae are a pair of robots 300 million kilometers from earth, one on a comet and the other orbiting it. Rosetta's orbits require a bit of work, if I remember correctly it's not a stable orbit and Rosetta needs to be within communication range of Philae while Philae is in the sunlight.

Science: Interpreting data is not easy and probably takes months in many cases. Once they've come to their conclusions they have to write and publish their papers which takes time.

Planning: They have to plan what they will do with Philae's future awake time which is filled with unknowns and opportunities that may only happen once.

neals• 11 years ago

I really thought the thing was lost when it bounced off a kilomter from the comet. The main-stream news-coverage (for me) ended in dissapointment. So did the lander actually fly back after that bounce and savely land on the surface? Great to hear.

interdrift• 11 years ago

They had confirmed that it had landed a bit rough.

sanqui• 11 years ago

It hasn't flown back, but the comet has moved and is now closer to the Sun, so there is more light for the lander.

allendoerfer• 11 years ago

The bouncing did not mean, that it went off the comet. It just landed very roughly and ended up in a place next to a wall with little exposition to sunlight.

wbhart• 11 years ago

It didn't fly back. It bounced, as in what goes up must (unless it achieves escape velocity), come back down. The comet has gravity, just like earth. Just not much, because it is much smaller than earth

CydeWeys4• 11 years ago

I wish Europe weren't so nuke-averse. The lander should have been powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), not solar panels. Then it would've had uninterrupted power for years and it could have been returning scientific data continuously since November.

Most of the US's long distance space probes have been powered with RTGs, which don't put nearly the same kinds of limitations on mission profiles. The New Horizons mission to Pluto, for example, is powered with 10.9 kg of plutonium that provides a steady 228 watts and enough heat to prevent the kind of cold-related damage we fear happened on Philae. That mission is so far from the Sun that it wouldn't even be possible with only solar panels.

johansch• 11 years ago

The so-called "green parties" have caused a lot of environmental damage to Europe and the earth. Instead of relatively speaking quite safe nuclear power, in many places we are getting quite dangerous coal power. Pretty much just out of ignorance.

rimantas• 11 years ago

I think nuclear power is safest even in absolute terms not only relatively.

EdwardDiego• 11 years ago

Germany's wind turbines and solar farms disagree. 30% of its energy is renewable.

sschueller• 11 years ago

It is probably also a lot easier for the US to launch a space probe with a nuke power source than Europe.

Regulatory requirements are very different and I am sure the US would not be too happy if Europe where to launch something with a nuke onboard without their approval.

inanutshellus• 11 years ago

I think putting a nuke on a rocket makes everyone nervous, not just the Americans...

ridgeguy• 11 years ago

Not so much easier.

There were demonstrations in America against the launch of Cassini, which is a nuclear RTG-powered spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9710/04/cassini/

dempseye2• 11 years ago

You're blaming this on Europe being nuke averse, but Europe is not a homogenous area. While some European countries may be nuke averse, others have adopted nuclear power to a huge extent.

There are other reasons why an RTG might not have been appropriate for Philae. They're pretty heavy, and the lander is pretty light. Also, it is wasteful to use an RTG that could last many years when the mission is only expected to last several months.

delinka• 11 years ago

Perhaps you have your causation backward: perhaps the mission was planned to last only months due to power limitations.

CydeWeys4• 11 years ago

You're right that Europe isn't homogenous, but it's not like every country in Europe has its own independent space agency. They have the ESA, which is nuke-averse. I was using "Europe" as a linguistic short-cut for the European space efforts, which are unified.

Per someone else's comment, RTGs don't have to be heavy. Wikipedia lists one as light as 2.1 kg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... Keep in mind that RTGs replace not just the solar panel and electricity generating systems but also a lot of the heating system as well.

You can see the breakdown on Philae here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philae_(spacecraft)#Design It uses about 16 kg total between the power system and thermal control system. You could fit in an RTG with the same or higher power output as the solar panels for the same mass. Philae in total is around 98 kg, which is definitely above the size threshold of craft that could be powered with an RTG.

herendin• 11 years ago

Maybe some country, or company, could start a profitable business of launching RTGs and selling them to the ESA after they are safely in orbit?

ajuc• 11 years ago

I wonder how high insurance costs for "launching radioactive isotopes into orbit" are.

gghh• 11 years ago

How about the PR strategy? "The lander wakes up, we get headlines again!"

</sarcasm>

platz• 11 years ago

http://www.popsci.com/nasa-can-make-3-more-nuclear-batteries...

http://www.space4peace.org/ianus/npsm2.htm#2_3

CydeWeys4• 11 years ago

Your links are out of date. The US has since resumed Pu 238 production for use in space-borne RTGs: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2164758...

Even if we hadn't resumed production, I'd still be arguing that the simple fix is to resume production and continue using the proven technology, not to simply give up on it.

duckmysick• 11 years ago

The European Space Agency together with the National Nuclear Laboratory are looking for a potential use of americium-241 in developing RTGs. So they aren't completely nuke-averse.

http://www.nnl.co.uk/news-media-centre/news-archive/space-ba... http://www.quora.com/How-does-ESA-plan-to-power-its-future-s...

Also, wasn't NASA's Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator canned in 2013 due to budget cuts? And recently there were problems with procuring plutonium-238. RTG isn't a silver bullet.

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2164758...

bitwize2• 11 years ago

"Europe" isn't nuke-averse; French nuclear plant designs are considered among the world's best, and Germany only backed off nuclear power when Fukushima happened.

In light of Fukushima I wish EVERYONE were more nuke-averse...

DasIch2• 11 years ago

Germany backed off nuclear power in the 90s long before Fukushima. That process was merely slowed down before Fukushima and set back on track afterward.

This has to also be kept in mind when considering nuclear power in Germany. The nuclear plants in Germany are so old that whether you are pro or contra on nuclear power, shutting down the existing plants is more or less a non-issue.

soperj• 11 years ago

In light of Fukushima, everyone should be more aware of what happens when you don't properly maintain, and update your nuclear power plants. In light of global warming, and carcenogens released caused by burning coal, I wish every one were more pro-nuclear.

kitd• 11 years ago

That mission is so far from the Sun that it wouldn't even be possible with only solar panels.

Maybe there's your answer?

bane• 11 years ago

It's awesome to wake up into a day knowing that humanity is taking another step forward into the boundaries of knowledge.

Absolutely awesome.

sidcool2• 11 years ago

Was this intentional hibernation?

kuschku2• 11 years ago

Yes and no. The original plan intended that Philae would have power due to being in the sun, but the lander bounced off of the comet and landed in a different place then expected, in the shadow of rough terrain.

Due to this the original set of experiments had to be completely run on battery, although the battery capacity was not intended for this.

So ESA had to hibernate it early, hoping one day it would get enough sunlight to be able to operate again, and allowing them to do more experiments – which happened now.

sidcool2• 11 years ago

Wow, that's amazing. Hope the lander didn't sustain any damage.

SCAQTony• 11 years ago

The first photo looks like a submerged, antique, sculpture of a man looking up towards the surface. Just beautiful!

140am• 11 years ago

Great news. The linked BBC video "What is 67P? In 60 seconds" was very informative as I had little knowledge about 67P :) http://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/embed/smpEmbed.html?playlist=http%3...

pimlottc• 11 years ago

Nice music, too ;)

stbullard• 11 years ago

Wow! And XKCD has already updated his epic Landing live-comic: https://xkcd.com/1446/

(See http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1446:_Landing for the background)

bitwize2• 11 years ago

I'm on a comet! I'm on a comet! Take a good hard look at the motherf*ing comet!

warmcat• 11 years ago

Wow....I just read "The Martian" novel and this reminds me of a scene when the astronaut uses the dead Pathfinder probe to communicate with Earth.

LAMike• 11 years ago

Awesome book!

saidajigumi• 11 years ago

The long-running XKCD comic "Landing" has been updated for the occasion:

http://xkcd.com/1446/

return0• 11 years ago

  "In any case, by March 2015, when the comet is closer to the Sun, 
  it is likely that the lander will become too hot to operate. [...] 
  It will next pass through perihelion on 13 August 2015, 
  186 million kilometres from the Sun."

(http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Freq...)

Will the heat affect the lander's measurements?

aaronharnly• 11 years ago

The NYTimes is running a nice collection[1] of the jaw-dropping photos of the comet from Rosetta over the course of the mission, including some from the past month, and the spectacular close fly-by in March.

As many faraway and strange places as we've explored in the Solar System so far, something about this comet – roughly the breadth of Central Park, yet with untold nooks and crannies – feels more coldly alien than anything else I've seen.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/20/science/space/...

jxcl• 11 years ago

These are fantastic. I want to get them printed and hang them up on my wall.

Philae comet lander wakes up

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