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Bullseye Landing On A Comet Next Month!!

rhinefire

rhinefire

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(I have trouble parking my truck)

BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency has confirmed the time and place it will attempt to land the first spacecraft on a comet.

The agency said Wednesday its unmanned probe Rosetta will release the 100-kilogram (220-pound) lander at 0835 GMT (3:35 EST) on Nov. 12.
The aim is to drop its lander Philae at a location dubbed 'Site J' on the 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) wide comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The maneuver will take about seven hours. But because the radio signals take 28 minutes to travel hundreds of millions of miles (kilometers) back to Earth, confirmation of a successful landing won't arrive until about 1603 GMT (11:03 a.m. EST).
Scientists hope the mission will help them learn more about the origins and evolution of objects in the universe.
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Online:
Rosetta | rendezvous with a comet
 
Yet another milestone in the exploration of space! This should be big news, but no, we have to hear about the Ebola scare over and over again.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Yet another milestone in the exploration of space! This should be big news, but no, we have to hear about the Ebola scare over and over again.
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So what practical use will landing on a comet provide you or I exactly?
 
Ockham said:
So what practical use will landing on a comet provide you or I exactly?
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Who knows?

Any advance in knowledge has spin offs that are of practical use. Maybe, if a comet were to be headed towards Earth, we could now land a space craft on it and deflect it just a bit. That would seem to me to be a practical advantage, but generally the practical benefits from new technology are things no one even foresaw.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Who knows?

Any advance in knowledge has spin offs that are of practical use. Maybe, if a comet were to be headed towards Earth, we could now land a space craft on it and deflect it just a bit. That would seem to me to be a practical advantage, but generally the practical benefits from new technology are things no one even foresaw.
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Let's hope so. I'd hate this to just be a "we did it because we could" moment.
 
Ockham said:
So what practical use will landing on a comet provide you or I exactly?
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Understanding the structure of comets might be important to deflecting one, some day. Good enough for you?

How about the engineering challenges that needed to be overcome? Those might be useful skills for, say, mining an asteroid, wouldn't you say? Got to land on an asteroid to mine it.
 
Deuce said:
Understanding the structure of comets might be important to deflecting one, some day. Good enough for you?
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Might be? Is that the purpose of this landing?
 
Ockham said:
Might be? Is that the purpose of this landing?
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Asteroid mining also, perhaps. That also requires landing on a thing in space with little gravity. Difficult engineering challenge to overcome, this seems like a good test case.
 
We also get additional measurements of interplanetary radiation! That's pretty useful information.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Well, if the Mediterranean still had the original meaning, center of the Earth, mankind wouldn't have advanced very much.
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I liked Deuce's first answer better - deflecting a comet would (give the other answers so far provided) be a more worthy endeavor. I get it - exploration and knowledge and all that, I just think it's number 92 on a list of things we should be doing.
 
Ockham said:
I liked Deuce's first answer better - deflecting a comet would (give the other answers so far provided) be a more worthy endeavor. I get it - exploration and knowledge and all that, I just think it's number 92 on a list of things we should be doing.
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The ability to deflect a comet, or perhaps an asteroid, is something that is foreseen that could be a benefit from landing on a comet. The most important advances from space exploration are things that are not foreseen.

Examples:

“We see the transformative effects of the Space Economy all around us through numerous technologies and life-saving capabilities. We see the Space Economy in the lives saved when advanced breast cancer screening catches tumors in time for treatment, or when a heart defibrillator restores the proper rhythm of a patient’s heart….We see it when weather satellites warn us of coming hurricanes, or when satellites provide information critical to understanding our environment and the effects of climate change. We see it when we use an ATM or pay for gas at the pump with an immediate electronic response via satellite. Technologies developed for exploring space are being used to increase crop yields and to search for good fishing regions at sea.”
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When the US entered the space race, it wasn't to establish GPS satellites, but to prove our system was better than the Communists who had put up the first man made satellite (Sputnik). GPS was just one of many unforeseen benefits to space exploration.
 
Ockham said:
I liked Deuce's first answer better - deflecting a comet would (give the other answers so far provided) be a more worthy endeavor. I get it - exploration and knowledge and all that, I just think it's number 92 on a list of things we should be doing.
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A lot of research is done without immediate concept of how it might be useful. Heck, penicillin was invented by accident and is arguably one of the biggest advances in medical history.
 
Ockham said:
I liked Deuce's first answer better - deflecting a comet would (give the other answers so far provided) be a more worthy endeavor. I get it - exploration and knowledge and all that, I just think it's number 92 on a list of things we should be doing.
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It is simply ingrained in the human DNA to continue to explore, to learn, to experience, to know. It is that human capacity that has given us most of the great knowledge that we have. Life was okay in Europe and the old map makers who had gone as far as they could said 'beyond this point there be dragons.' Why venture into the unknown, the highest peaks, the hottest valleys, the widest oceans back when there was no compelling reason to do so? Because humans wanted to know. No other species seems to posses such curiosity and interest in learning. Once we beat the Russians to the moon to ensure that the Russians would have control of the space around the Earth, we returned. Why? Because we were curious. We wanted to know what was there. Why send Voyager out into the unknown? Because we wanted to know what was there. It is the force that drives all scientific experimentation and knowledge.

So why not see if we can land a transmitter on a comet and find out where these mysterious objects go. What can we learn? We don't know until we just follow our insatiable curiosity to know.
 
Edit to previous post: I should have said so that the Russians would NOT have control of space around the Earth.
 
We will be mining asteroids very soon.

Step 1; Use a near earth object as a source of fuel for space ships to go to the asteroids.

Step 2; Capture an asteroid or comet. Bring it into Earth orbit.

Step 3; Mine it for water (better fuel) deuterium and whatever else it has.

Step 4; Go and get an asteroid made of titanium, gold and the stuff they make batteries out of and bring that one back.

Step 5; Achieve the greatest single leap in human wealth ever.
 
Ockham said:
Meh... not a very compelling reason IMO.
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Says the guy communicating instantaneously with people from all over the globe.

Yep, no reason at all for scientific endeavors... :roll:
 
Ockham said:
I liked Deuce's first answer better - deflecting a comet would (give the other answers so far provided) be a more worthy endeavor. I get it - exploration and knowledge and all that, I just think it's number 92 on a list of things we should be doing.
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This might come as a surprise to you, but mankind is doing more than 92 things right now. We're up to at least number 97, surely...
 
the_recruit said:
Says the guy communicating instantaneously with people from all over the globe.

Yep, no reason at all for scientific endeavors... :roll:
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Actually you can't be more wrong... I'm questioning one specific endeavor not all endeavors since the beginning of time. There's a difference.
 
the_recruit said:
This might come as a surprise to you, but mankind is doing more than 92 things right now. We're up to at least number 97, surely...
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Then we must be doing them very badly.
 
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