Good luck Philae......

In about 2 hrs we should receive confirmation of the first ever landing on a 4.5 billion year old comet. In my view, this is an absolute mind fuck.....

Separation from the orbital craft occurred successfully 5 hrs ago and was accurate to the nearest mm. One mm off would mean an error of 250 m on the landing site. Absolutely fucking incredible!

It will help us understand the origins of planetary formation and is another piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the origins of the universe. The mission planning began in 1984 with a launch in 2004.

It is now on an automated descent path to a landing site. It cannot be controlled directly due to radio signals taking 30 minutes to reach the orbiting craft. It's about the size of a domestic fridge and it will fire harpoons into the surface to grip and secure the lander while boosting downward to impact the comet at around 1 m/s. It will then drill into the surface and send back data. The comet is unexpectedly rocky so the landing is rated as 75% chance of success. The comet is about half the size of central London.

This is already a huge achievement for the European Space Agency and its contributing partners. Check out the live feed for landing pictures at 1600 UTC from here .

Again, congrats for a successful mission so far and here's to unlocking more secrets of the universe.

Go play High Frontier to celebrate this amazing event.

I hope they leave Bruce Willis on that rock

We're trying to land on a freakin' comet. We can be pretty amazing sometimes.

Success!! Humankind has landed on a comet!!!!

Even Shatner sent them a message....cool

/cue Aerosmith music.


...i just close my eyes...

If only we could stop killing one another as a species, and spend our military resources (globally) on the furtherance of humankind, we'd already have four or five colonies.

Lots of good stuff on the official ESA site: http://rosetta.esa.int/

XKCD is doing a cool tribute: http://xkcd1446.org/

Cool ESA YouTube video showing the voyage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEQuE5N3rwQ

And another neat ESA 3D visualization: http://sci.esa.int/where_is_rosetta/

Latest news is that telemetry/data seems to indicate that Philae (the probe) didn't properly deploy it's little harpoons to anchor to the comet. It may have landed, bounced, rotated a bit, and landed again. Sounds like it may still not be properly anchored, but it has been sending data back. If I understand correctly the Rosetta satellite is now on the other side of the comet and there will be more data when it comes back into Philae's view in the morning (GMT).

Whatever it's status, the fact that it got to the comet, made touchdown, and was transmitting data is huge. Hope it's still there and transmitting when Rosetta comes back around.

the future is here! We are landing on comets and we have a black president!

I wasn't aware Canada had any president.

Huzzah for space!

SuperflyTNT wrote: If only we could stop killing one another as a species, and spend our military resources (globally) on the furtherance of humankind, we'd already have four or five colonies.

It's like I'm always saying, Roddenberry gave us the fucking blueprints, man...

Latest News:

Philae in snooze mode; Sexist Shirt spotted on earth scientist.

I don't even have fucking words... What sexist shirt are YOU wearing?

Hex Sinister wrote: Latest News:

Philae in snooze mode; Sexist Shirt spotted on earth scientist.

I don't even have fucking words... What sexist shirt are YOU wearing?

Dunno, I wear a red shirt. MUST BE sexist right? May be if I wear a shirt with "Dick Power" on it... *sigh*

yeah, the twitter war that shirt set off was nuts

Black Barney wrote: yeah, the twitter war that shirt set off was nuts

The main problem with twitter seems to be that ANYBODY GIVES A FUCK!