ESA rejoices as comet-chasing Rosetta probe wakes from 3-year nap The European Space Agency (ESA) doesn't usually have the atmosphere of a soccer stadium, but a very belated ping-back that showed the Rosetta comet-chasing spacecraft to be back in business moved normally reserved boffins to wild exuberance. "We got it!" roared Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor, punching the air with glee …
"The package hasn't had a full systems check since June 2011, and there'll be software updates to get into place if Rosetta is to complete her mission."
It's bad enough getting desktop OS updates on well established 'tried and tested' earthly sytems. Working on Rosetta would terrify me. A pint, for each of the entire massive team
Anyone know why it partook of an extended doze?
After one night's sleep I need a few minutes before I'm sufficiently aware of what I'm doing to be able to operate the shower taps and then do a second stage boot taking input from /dev/coffee, only after which I'm fully functional (insofar as, etc.).
With that in mind, a couple of hours after a three year nap doesn't sound absurd.
Icon is for heating the water involved.
It was due to wake up at 10 UTC, it then needs to warm itself up, look at the stars to work out which way it is facing, stop itself spinning, position itself so the antenna points to Earth and turn the transmitter on. Then the signal needs to get here. The estimated time to hear from it was between 17:30 and 18:30. They actually heard from it at 18:17 I think, which was within the expected window. Obviously it was towards the end of the window, and equally obviously things must have been fairly tense.
But the article is just wrong.
Well lets play Bill Clinton on what is meant by 'asleep'.
Could it mean that most of the systems and subsystems were down and minimal power was used?
;-)
I really have to wonder how much drift in the clock occurred over the last time the clocks sync'd with earth based clocks.
Also what clock is being used on board the aircraft?
The clocks aren't sync'd with ground, they're free-running counters. Correlation between the on board time and UTC is performed on ground by comparing dedicated time packets' generation time to the earth received time.
I would expect the wide window of first contact time is mainly due to uncertainties in how long it takes to heat up, de-spin, acquire the attitude from the star tracker, and point the high gain antenna to Earth, rather than due to excessive clock drift with respect to UTC.
Several articles around the web (including this one) give Rosetta a female pronoun. I know, and approve of, the convention (in English) of referring to a terrestrial ship as "she" but this is the first time I recall it being done for a space vessel. Is it because Rosetta sounds a bit like a woman's name? But if it's named for the Rosetta Stone, then the moniker derives from the place where the stone was unearthed, in Egypt, which is definitely an 'it'.
@Johnathan Richards 1
"But if it's named for the Rosetta Stone, then the moniker derives from the place where the stone was unearthed, in Egypt, which is definitely an 'it'."
Places most certainly have a gender. Most countries (can't speak for specific towns/localities) are feminine in French, which is the relevant language in this case and indeed 'Rosette' is feminine.
Rosetta is a woman's name, not only in Italian (e.g. the singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe who was a black American.)
This spaceship is not only female, she is carrying a small spaceship, which means that if she encounters a bit of cosmic rock she will probably run over it while screaming "Can't you see I've got a child with me"?
(I don't normally post mildly sexist things but Simon Hoggart, who died recently, had a particular thing about this kind of behaviour, so I'm making the comment posthumously on his behalf.)
The thing had to warm up after three years in space. They always said they were expecting a response at between 5:30 and 6:30 gmt and it arrived at 6:15.
Frankly I'm blown away by this. Sod the bit about landing on a comet - if they can get a computer to wake up in a working state after three years in space then the rest is simple.
I know if I'd written it they would have been greeted by a prompt 'disk sda has not been checked for 900 days, do you wish to check now? y/n' and some poor yt ladwould have had to nip up with a ps2 keyboard.
"if they can get a computer to wake up in a working state after three years in space then the rest is simple."
It is indeed impressive.
In fact it sounds like the predecessor to technology that might, in the future, allow a deep-space refinery vessel to automatically wake it's crew from stasis so that they can respond to an automated distress beacon from a nearby planet...
"...why is so much money still being spent on space exploration..."
Some would say that's a valid point of view I suppose.
It's a good job not everyone thinks like you though, otherwise we'd still be squatting in caves banging rocks together wondering what the shiny shiny things in the sky are...
In these days of austerity ans in many places ... abject poverty, why is so much money still being spent on space exploration? Surely the money would be better spent sorting out our problems.
If mankind has any lessons left to learn from welfare, it can only be this: It. Does. Not. Work.
Giving up the opportunity to learn from the stars (and by that I don't mean Jade Goody) will not solve anyones problems.
Uber long term all the species on earth will only survive if we can colonise other worlds.
"The spacecraft was due to signal back to ESA at 10am UTC on Monday morning, but overslept by over eight hours."
No, it was due to "wake up" at 10:00, not signal then. It then spent the expected 8 hours warming itself up, turning on its star trackers to figure out its orientation, fire it's thrusters to correct any spin and align its transceiver with earth. THEN it signalled home, with the signal taking about 45 minutes to reach us.
It wasn't 8 hours late. If anything it was 15 minutes "late" compared with completely accurate time-keeping, but even then was 15 minutes inside the window of expected contact.
Huge congratulations to the engineers involved, but wait a minute. It's in the vicinity of Jupiter and It needs to point its' antenna back to earth..
Ring any bells ???
"OK HAL point the AE35 antenna to earth for a new mesage.."
By now black helicopter spotters will be convinced the comet is in fact a big black brick 1*3*9
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"In these days of austerity ans in many places (including the UK and USA) abject poverty, why is so much money still being spent on space exploration?"
Anyone who poses this question has never compared a government's space spending with its social welfare spending. A couple of examples:
The US spends proportionally (and absolutely) the most money on space exploration, yet the federal government spends about 120x more on social services than space exploration. In 2012, its federal budget had $17.7 billion for NASA versus $2,041.9 billion for the budgetary sum of: the Social Security Administration; Department of Health & Human Services; Department of Education; Department of Veterans Affairs; Department of Housing; and the Department of Labor. (This does not include US state government spending on social services, or space spending by various military branches, which are relatively small compared to the above budgets.)
The UK spent $379.5 million in 2010 on the UK Space Agency, plus $300 million for the ESA. In comparison, its 2010 social services budget (the sum of pensions, health care, education, and welfare) was $540 billion, so the ratio of social services to space spending was 795:1.
One of the implications from these numbers is that when governments are spending $X bajillion dollars on welfare and there's still poverty, increasing anti-poverty budgets by 0.1% to 1% is probably not going to miraculously fix matters.
On the other hand, there's still utility in exploration and scientific research. Even if a rock-tasting robot on Mars doesn't yield any life-changing data, the engineering that went into it usually finds a way into improving our lives. The World Wide Web was developed to help physics research centers like CERN share data more easily; I don't know if CERN's research in the early 1990s revolutionized the world (examples welcome, of course), but the WWW has had a huge impact.
Sounds like they've already made up their minds about what the surface is made up of... Have a look at "The Electric Comet" video and you may get a feel for what they will try to do with the data from this mission - likely a repeat of "stardust" and the comet borelly missions. The best type of quote will be "We know the ice is there, it's just well-hidden..." http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2002/release_2002_80.html. Wonder if they will find Olivene - like they did on the Stardust mission. http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/status/060313.html
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