#Philae: reflections and hopes
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2015/03/13/philae-reflections-and-hopes
Lead #lander scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring (IAS, Orsay, France) reflects on the events surrounding comet #Landing four months ago, and shares his hopes for #philae’s reactivation. For years we dreamt of visiting a comet, to perform in situ analyses of a pristine Solar System object. For Philae, the first giant challenge was to land. We always knew that achieving our scientific goals would require us to face extreme conditions, so cold and unpredictable would be the comet environment at such distances from the Sun – nearly 450 million kilometres around #landing day. Our mission was expected to present enormous risks: the reality was even tougher. All scientific #Operations planned for the descent up to 10 hours after touchdown had been preloaded, ready to be run in an automated fashion. They (...)
#Comet_67P #Instruments ##CometLanding #instruments #landing_day #science