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Rosetta Mission

Hatch

By Hatch
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Hatch

Hatch

Posted
Posted

amazing stuff what they have achieved here , but I can't get my head around this

 

How are we getting the pictures back instantly?

 

Shouldn't it take days or weeks or whatever to arrive seeing as it is so far away.

hypochondriac

hypochondriac

Posted
Posted
amazing stuff what they have achieved here , but I can't get my head around this

 

How are we getting the pictures back instantly?

 

Shouldn't it take days or weeks or whatever to arrive seeing as it is so far away.

 

25 minutes isn't it?

badgerx16

badgerx16

Posted
Posted
amazing stuff what they have achieved here , but I can't get my head around this

How are we getting the pictures back instantly?

Shouldn't it take days or weeks or whatever to arrive seeing as it is so far away.

25 minutes isn't it?

Approx 317 million miles divided by the speed of transmission ( = the speed of light ).

badgerx16

badgerx16

Posted
Posted
It's absolutely farking mind-boggling what they've done.

 

One of the comments on the BBC;

"We can land a probe on a comet after travelling 6 billion miles in ten years, yet some people can't park inside the lines on a car park".

DS

DS

Posted
Posted

It isn't instant; transmission back takes about 24 minutes. I believe the signals are sent on radio waves. Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum (i.e. in space). If you wanted to send a radio wave to the Sun it would take about 8 minutes. Because the comet's distance from Earth is currently almost three times the distance from the Sun to the Earth it means signals the take around 3*8 minutes to get from the comet to here.

 

The whole thing mission is incredible and mind boggling really. It really is an amazing achievement.

 

Lots of good info (and pics) here for those interested:

 

http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/

 

Also some good info on the comet's position here:

 

http://www.livecometdata.com/comets/67p-churyumov-gerasimenko/

Patrick Bateman

Patrick Bateman

Posted
Posted
amazing stuff what they have achieved here , but I can't get my head around this

 

How are we getting the pictures back instantly?

 

Shouldn't it take days or weeks or whatever to arrive seeing as it is so far away.

 

I find it amazing - isn't the comet travelling at something like 34,000 mph as well? Brilliant!

SO16_Saint

SO16_Saint

Posted
Posted

300 million miles away (or something like that); travelling at 34,000 KPH; 24 minute time delay in transmission, 10 year mission, 25 years in the planning...

 

Wonder how much money has been spent on this. I still dont understand WHY it's been done, but what they have done is incredible.

 

BUT - in a day and age like this, we still cant have an x-ray where the person taking the xray $hits himself and stands behind a glass wall everytime

Jimmy_D

Jimmy_D

Posted
Posted

All experiments for first science phase completed and all data returned, almost a complete success in terms of initial goals for the lander :D

 

Cost ended up being about 20p per person that paid tax towards it per year (so about £4 per tax payer in total for this mission). Seems pretty reasonable to me!

 

One snag seems to be that one of the experiments to help determine the composition of the comet (APXS), the shutter on it failed to open, so it only returned data about the composition of the shutter. They found that the lander was (contrary to what was initially thought) actually sat on all three lander legs. This let the drill return a sample from the surface, and experiments (COSAC and Ptolemy) ran on both that and samples from the thin dust in the space floating above the surface of the comet, so that should be enough to determine the composition.

 

Almost perfect in terms of power budget from the initial battery to get all that done, they used remaining power to run the CONSERT experiment again, data from that should allow them to triangulate where on the comet Philae ended up.

 

They've shifted it slightly to try and improve the solar power generation, and as it gets closer to the sun it might get more solar power, so we might get some bonus data running stuff again (maybe even get APXS working properly), but even if that's it, it's already an incredible success.

 

The Russians were the first to get into space, the USA were the first to land on the moon, Europe are the first to land on a comet. :)

I've always wondered what it must have been like, seeing the moon landings, realizing new ground was being broken. I've had a little taste of that now :D

ecuk268

ecuk268

Posted
Posted
How does it compare to your experience of the Moon landings then?

 

I was 19 in July '69. I decided to make a bed on my mum's sofa so that I could watch the moment on our black and white TV when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

 

It must have been around 2 or 3 in the morning when it happened and I managed to get a few hours sleep afterwards. I'll never forget it. I loved the Apollo years

with James Burke and Patrick Moore commentating on the live BBC coverage.

 

Unfortunately, the US public quickly got bored of space travel and NASA couldn't secure the funds to continue.

Horley CTFC Saint

Horley CTFC Saint

Posted
Posted
I was 19 in July '69. I decided to make a bed on my mum's sofa so that I could watch the moment on our black and white TV when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.

 

It must have been around 2 or 3 in the morning when it happened and I managed to get a few hours sleep afterwards. I'll never forget it. I loved the Apollo years

with James Burke and Patrick Moore commentating on the live BBC coverage.

 

Unfortunately, the US public quickly got bored of space travel and NASA couldn't secure the funds to continue.

 

I was only 11 and watched it live too - I had it at about 4 in the morning but whatever it was early! Something of a life changer in many ways too. Drawn into it all by my big brother who's the scientist in our family but will be forever grateful for that as it fuelled a lifelong interes.t in the Cosmos and space exploration.

 

It was gutting at the time how quickly the public lost interest in the whole programme with only the prospect of three astronauts frying on Apollo 13 seemingly temporarily fuelling greater interest in the later Apollos

L_O_Z

L_O_Z

Posted
Posted
It makes you realise just how unbelievably small we are / vast the universe is. Its taken man 10 years to travel part way across one star's solar system. Yet there are 70 thousand million million million (70 sextillion or 7 × 1022) stars in the Universe. Source: http://www.rmg.co.uk/...many-stars...many-stars/galaxies-in-the-universe

 

And possibly an infinite number of universes, if you agree with the theory of inflation :o

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