In less than 12 hours, a fridge called Phil will be touching down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.
Of course that's nonsense, but in less than 12 hours, a fridge sized lander called Philae will be landing on the aforementioned comet as part of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. The mission will analyse the comet and do all kinds of interesting stuff.
Find out all the latest, including watching the mission control room, at http://rosetta.esa.int/ - to be honest it's not that exciting, but I think everyone's been clearly briefed about the webcam - everyone looks busy (although you can't see their screens so they could be playing Solitaire) and they do seem to surreptitiously glance at the webcam when passing near it. And there appears to be music playing, I don't know if the music is actually playing in the control room or if its to replace whatever noise there is in the room, I assume that it's much like any other workplace and there's the danger of someone within the range of the webcam complaining about a co-worker, eating a bacon sandwich, or swearing when they realise that they forgot to charge their smartphone, so not transmitting sound is probably a good idea.
Nevertheless, I'm doing my best to piece together what's going on. There's a guy in a suit who walks around - I think that he's a boss of some sort, perhaps making sure that the mission will achieve its agreed objective of landing on a chunk of ice.
Then there are some guys with shaved heads with headsets on. I think that these are possibly telesales operatives selling secondhand fridges, as I presume prior to launching the mission they probably used a lot of fridges to see how to crash one into a comet without breaking it - they're probably a lot cheaper to damage than a space science probe.
There are also some other guys also wearing headsets but with hair. I think that these are IT technicians because I've seen them at least once get under a desk, which in my experience means that they are computer techies fixing the network or plugging in a USB cable or some such thing.
Finally there is one other quite young guy with hair, glasses, and no headset. He's clearly a trainee who perhaps is on day release from the local college, and I'm surprised that I haven't seen him bringing anyone coffee yet.
So do head over to the website at about 8.30am GMT when I expect the room will be a lot fuller as they do the rather challenging task of landing a fridge probe onto a speeding chunk of ice by remote. Seriously though, all the best to the ESA with this incredible mission!
Showing posts with label comet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comet. Show all posts
Tuesday, 11 November 2014
A fridge lands on a comet
Location:
Kingston-upon-Hull, UK
Saturday, 5 January 2013
Comet Ison is coming
Everyone else in the world has known about this for about a week, but I've just become aware of a rather cool event happening towards the end of 2013.
Comet C/2012 S1 (common name Ison) is going to be coming in, and providing it survives its very tight orbit around the sun, should be visible to the naked eye between October 2013 and January 2014. As someone who as a kid was into astronomy (and as I grew up complemented this with wedges of science fiction goodness) this is rather cool.
For those who like to muck about with stuff, you can play with a model of the comet on the Nasa website at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=C%2F2012%20S1;orb=1
In other news, what colour are the dots in the picture below?
Left ones are green and the right ones are blue, yeah?
Nope.
They're all green.
This is a colour illusion called the land effect that I originally saw on the Vsauce channel - check out the video (with loads of other cool illusions)
Comet C/2012 S1 (common name Ison) is going to be coming in, and providing it survives its very tight orbit around the sun, should be visible to the naked eye between October 2013 and January 2014. As someone who as a kid was into astronomy (and as I grew up complemented this with wedges of science fiction goodness) this is rather cool.
For those who like to muck about with stuff, you can play with a model of the comet on the Nasa website at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=C%2F2012%20S1;orb=1
In other news, what colour are the dots in the picture below?
![]() |
| Image copyright Akiyoshi Kitaoki 2010, original accessible from http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/color13e.html |
Left ones are green and the right ones are blue, yeah?
Nope.
They're all green.
This is a colour illusion called the land effect that I originally saw on the Vsauce channel - check out the video (with loads of other cool illusions)
Labels:
comet,
dots,
ison,
land effect
Location:
Hull, Kingston upon Hull, UK
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