{"id":16832,"date":"2014-11-14T01:07:39","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T17:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/researchers-race-to-collect-comet-data-from-philae\/"},"modified":"2014-11-14T01:07:39","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T17:07:39","slug":"researchers-race-to-collect-comet-data-from-philae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/researchers-race-to-collect-comet-data-from-philae\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers race to collect comet data from Philae"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Philae_touchdown\"
Artist\u2019s concept of the Philae lander. Credit: ESA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

DARMSTADT, Germany \u2014 Comet scientists planned to send up new orders to Europe\u2019s Philae lander Thursday to kick off a second day of research after the probe endured a jumpy touchdown on comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.<\/p>\n

Time is of the essence because the oven-sized landing craft is facing a power crunch.<\/p>\n

The lander bounced across the comet\u2019s tortured landscape before coming to rest near a cliff that blocks sunlight from reaching Philae\u2019s solar panels, meaning the craft\u2019s power generation system may be unable to recharge its batteries.<\/p>\n

Officials said Thursday the Philae might be on its side, with two of its landing legs contacting the comet\u2019s surface and another off the ground.<\/p>\n

The first images from Philae\u2019s CIVA camera system \u2014 made up of seven micro-cameras in a ring around the lander \u2014 appeared to show fragments of rock illuminated by the sun on one side of the probe and the sky on the other side.<\/p>\n

Philae\u2019s landing legs also appear in the images.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe saw both something that man built \u2014 the lander \u2014 you see the foot there, and something that nature built 4.6 billion years ago, which is a comet essentially preserved as it was at that time, containing all the history that we\u2019re trying to look at,\u201d said Jean-Pierre Bibring, Philae\u2019s chief scientist and head of the CIVA camera team from Institut d\u2019Astrophysique Spatiale in Paris. \u201cWe have no idea what is around, or whether or not what is black is just shadow or open sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Rosetta\u2019s
Rosetta\u2019s lander Philae has returned the first panoramic image from the surface of a comet. The view, unprocessed, as it has been captured by the CIVA-P imaging system, shows a 360\u00ba view around the point of final touchdown. The three feet of Philae\u2019s landing gear can be seen in some of the frames. Superimposed on top of the image is a sketch of the Philae lander in its current configuration. Credit: ESA\/Rosetta\/Philae\/CIVA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bibring said many scientists expected the comet\u2019s surface to be powdery, allowing the lander to settle instead of rebounding back into space.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a powder, it\u2019s a rock, so it\u2019s like a trampoline,\u201d Bibring said. \u201cYou go there and it ejects you immediately afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials have not pinpointed the lander\u2019s location on the comet.<\/p>\n

Stephan Ulamec, leader of the Philae team at DLR \u2014 the German Aerospace Center \u2014 said the landing craft could have bounced up to a kilometer (0.6 miles) off the comet before coming back down a kilometer away from the mission\u2019s intended touchdown site.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a better understanding now of how we got there, but we still do not really know where (the lander is located),\u201d Ulamec said.<\/p>\n

According to Ulamec, the next opportunity to contact Philae will be after 1900 GMT (2 p.m. EST) Thursday.<\/p>\n

Ground teams based at the European Space Operations Center here, the lander control center in Cologne, Germany and the Philae science team headquarters in Toulouse, France, will uplink commands to the probe Thursday night through the Rosetta orbiter, which released Philae for its seven-hour descent Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\"This
This image from Rosetta\u2019s camera, taken in September, shows the place Philae first landed before bouncing twice and finally coming to rest about a kilometer away. Credit: ESA\/Rosetta\/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS\/UPD\/LAM\/IAA\/SSO\/INTA\/UPM\/DASP\/IDA.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ulamec and Bibring said the command upload Thursday night will likely include orders to deploy a boom designed to measure the temperature of the comet\u2019s surface and an X-ray spectroscopy instrument to study the chemical composition of material around Philae\u2019s landing site.<\/p>\n

Controllers will also tell Philae to take pictures for another panorama after adjusting the camera\u2019s exposure settings in hopes of improving on the imagery released Thursday.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to be very careful about activating mechanisms,\u201d Ulamec said.<\/p>\n

The extension of Philae\u2019s temperature boom could nudge the lander out of its current position. The comet\u2019s feeble gravity field \u2014 one hundred thousand times less than Earth \u2014 means the lander, which weighed about 220 pounds on Earth, weighs as much as a paperclip after landing.<\/p>\n

Officials want to see how the deployment of instrument arms Thursday night changes the lander\u2019s orientation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will be able to see whether this has modified our position,\u201d Bibring said.<\/p>\n

Plans to use Philae\u2019s drill, which is supposed to bore nearly a foot into the comet nucleus, pose more problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are hesitant in the next hours or day to activate the drill because drilling without being anchored and without knowing how we are on the surface is dangerous,\u201d Ulamec said. \u201cWe may just tip over our lander.\u201d<\/p>\n

The drill is designed to extract a core sample and deliver the soil to a miniaturized laboratory on the lander for analysis. Scientists are trying to find out if the comet contains ice made of water similar to that on Earth, and they are looking for signs of organic molecules like amino acids, the building blocks of life.<\/p>\n

Comets may have seeded Earth with water and organics, allowing life to spring up billions of years ago.<\/p>\n

Bibring said such measurements are \u201cfundamental\u201d to the Philae mission, but some of the lander\u2019s sensors could gather data in \u201csniffing mode\u201d not requiring direct contact with the material.<\/p>\n

\"Philae's
Philae\u2019s instrument package. Credit: ESA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cOf course, we want to drill, but we have to secure the drill,\u201d Bibring said.<\/p>\n

Ulamec dismissed discussion \u2014 at least for now \u2014 of trying to fire the lander\u2019s harpoons, which failed to engage during Philae\u2019s descent Wednesday to anchor the spacecraft to the comet.<\/p>\n

Momentum from firing the harpoons \u2014 assuming they still work \u2014 could propel the lander out of its current location into a more favorable place for exposure to sunlight, which could generate power to keep Philae from freezing.<\/p>\n

Philae\u2019s power crisis could drain the lander\u2019s primary and secondary batteries by this weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether this will be able to make it to tomorrow evening, Saturday or Sunday, we don\u2019t know,\u201d Bibring said. \u201cIt\u2019s only when it fails do you know how much time you had.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a press briefing from Philae\u2019s science operations center in Toulouse earlier Thursday, officials estimated the lander had between 50 and 55 hours of power left in its batteries.<\/p>\n

The lander was designed to operate for more than two days on battery power, then recharge its batteries with solar energy for an extended mission that could last until March, when the probe is expected to overheat as the comet nears the sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see that we get less solar power than we planned for at the nominal landing site,\u201d said Koen Geurts, Philae\u2019s technical manager at the lander control center in Cologne. \u201cWe receive about 1.5 hours of sunlight with regard to the 6 or 7 (hours) that we were aiming for. Of course, (this) has an impact on our energy budget and our capabilities to conduct science for extended period of time afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bibring said Philae carries 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of equipment that must be heated to at least minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit) to keep it from freezing. If the hardware gets too cold, the lander will not be able to wake back up again.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need energy to survive,\u201d Bibring said. \u201cThere is a minimum energy to do that \u2014 a few watts.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the long-term mission, Philae was expected to wake up for intermittent research observations and hibernate to recharge its batteries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are calculating now what this means for the near future \u2026 but unfortunately this is not the situation that we were hoping for,\u201d Geurts said.<\/p>\n

With the future of Philae uncertain beyond the weekend, scientists are focused on the short-term.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to pack in as much as we can now,\u201d Bibring said.<\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist\u2019s concept of the Philae lander. Credit: ESA DARMSTADT, Germany \u2014 Comet scientists planned to send up new orders to Europe\u2019s Philae lander Thursday to kick off a second day of research after the probe endured a jumpy touchdown on comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Time is of the essence because the oven-sized landing craft is facing a power […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3573,3609,3373],"class_list":["post-16832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-comet-landing","tag-philae","tag-rosetta"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16832"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}