'Time for risks' with comet lander

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30050349

'Time for risks' with comet lander

Scientists working on Philae comet lander say it is time to take more risks with the probe, amid fears battery might die in hours.

(continued, the spirit of peak oil...the path to oblivion...drill frack and be damned....)

[Clinton Huxley]

It's the robot Apollo 13.

[pErvinalia]

It should just gaffer tape itself to the rock.

[cronus]

They've panic stations and drilled.

[mistermack]

I reckon they've missed some tricks when they designed it.
With the gravity being so low, it would take only the tiniest puff of gas to right the thing, if it lay on it's side. They could have put tiny canisters on the sides, and manoeuvered it around as they liked.

And a couple on the bottom, and they could jump it hundreds of feet into space, and land on a new spot.

[Sean Hayden]

I don't know. Play around with a free physics engine and see if you can make it work. Set the gravity to low and apply various forces to an object to see if you can get it to jump up/right itself/land were you want it. -can be tricky and that's without any other real world considerations

[Clinton Huxley]

You should insure those powers of hindsight, Mack.

[mistermack]

You should insure those powers of hindsight, Mack.

Well, it wouldn't take much foresight. If you sit down, and think what might go wrong, the first thing would be landing on a slope, and falling on it's side.
There was plenty of talk about that when the European thing that we sent to Mars didn't work.

And if you are designing solar panels, you have to think what problems they might encounter. And being in the shade is a biggie.

When you're spending that sort of money, I'm sure that you would be sitting down and asking for suggestions of what might go wrong.

[Clinton Huxley]

They'd be up against weight restrictions. Add a gas thruster, lose an instrument.

[mistermack]

They'd be up against weight restrictions. Add a gas thruster, lose an instrument.

Yes, very possibly. But I'm talking about a teeny tiny gas thruster. That's all you would need, in near zero gravity.
And even though this lander isn't very big, the whole craft is actually quite a substantial bit of kit, So a few extra grams on the lander wouldn't necessarily be crucial.

I would think though, when this was being designed, they probably didn't really give it too much chance of making a safe landing, so they were being conservative with the design, and that's quite understandable.

Right now though, they are probably wishing that they'd added a bit more kit.

[cronus]

They should have included a fistful of Semtex for the lulz.

[Clinton Huxley]

Conservative with a comet lander design? Like there's a traditional way of doing that...

[mistermack]

Conservative with a comet lander design? Like there's a traditional way of doing that...

Conservative, in the sense of non-extravagant.

There must be a feeling, when you're designing something for this sort of project, that the odds are against making a successful landing.Which might deter you from doing too much work on the finer points of the lander
Just going into orbit around the comet was probably no better odds than fifty fifty at the time.

[Clinton Huxley]

Looks like they are getting ready to spring the legs to move it.

[klr]

Oh well ... looks like it's gone to sleep. Not enough sunshine where it is to build up vitamin D ... I mean, battery power.

If this had happened in the 1970s, some Prog Rock band would have made a double concept album about the mission.