Wednesday 11 March 2015

Springtime also for Philae

The ESA blog by Emily announced today that Rosetta will begin listening for signs that Philae is still “alive”. This may be possible and hopeful but realistically maybe still too early. When last seen, (Wed Nov 12 2014) one of Philae's legs looked like this:

Now not quite a week later (Mon 17 Nov), I took this image of the 1:1 Philae model with a friendly bystander for scale:


I do not know which of the 3 leg pods is in the Philae image. Here are some other views of the model
in Göttingen:




There is a neat cartoon of the landing which helps put it into another perspective.Rosetta and Philae were ready! One ought to remember that Rosetta has 11 experiments, all working, all gather data. All 21 experiments on both Rosetta and Philae are described in this fact sheet

Any questions?

wob

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