Philae landing on the nucleus of Comet 67P C-G Options

[vikingmars]

Now, it's time to open a new section devoted to the landing of the Philae lander itself on the nucleus of Comet 67P C-G.

Also to answer better the earlier post,
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=212943
and for your information, here is the quick summary (as a "pdf" file) of the events that are expected to occur during landing on the nucleus and after : it's the timeschedule on which we are working to set up our EPO event in Paris.
 Sequence_ATTERRISSAGE10_UMSF.pdf ( 263.81K ) Number of downloads: 4545

The landing itself should occur around November 11th.

We'll keep you informed

[dvandorn]

As Curiosity demonstrated, though, it is quite possible (with modern electronics) to take descent images, store them and send them back to Earth later, when the landing sequence is *not* making the lander too busy to add the image transmission to its duties.

I would hope that planetary landers from now into the future will have this capability. It's not just valuable for developing context of the landing site within the general area, it also has the highest "cool factor" of any part of the missions, IMHO.

-the other Doug (With my shield, not yet upon it)

[mcgyver]

I would hope that planetary landers from now into the future will have this capability.

What I really hope/expect from future missions is HD video-shooting capability, rather than 1 Frame Per DAY "videos" ! Processor power and storage space are no more a mass/space issue, even if you'd enclose processor and RAM inside a lead box 3 mm thick! (Who cares if it will take years to send HD data back to earth? One day or the other they'll eventually arrive)

What was available on the (space) market in 1993 (date of mission acceptance) for onboard processing power and data storage? 10 MHz and 10 MB?

[djellison]

(Who cares if it will take years to send HD data back to earth? One day or the other they'll eventually arrive)

There's a few issues with what you're saying. Firstly - Rosetta is taking a lot lot more than 1 frame per day..... that's simply what's being released at the moment. Once all this data is delivered to ESA's PSA - there will be hundreds of image of 67P that people will be able to turn into pretty amazing animations.


And who cares how long it might take to downlink an HD video? Well actually - all the scientists and engineers entrusted with operating Rosetta and doing science with it. The amount of data it's possible to return from the somewhere as far as 67P is a massive constraint on operations. It's not a question of taking an HD camera, or processing it's data...it's getting it back to Earth.

A rough calculation: 90 second of highly compressed 720p video is around 170 Megabytes. At typical data rates from Rosetta - that would take 8 HOURS to download from the spacecraft. That represents pretty much an entire day's downlink from a typical deep space spacecraft. And for what? An HD video 90 seconds long that, to be honest, would be better represented by a few 2k x 2k still images anyway - and you would have given up all the other scientific measurements Rosetta could take that day. These spacecraft do not last for ever. It's wrong to assume data will somehow magically make it to Earth eventually.


Curiosity is capable of, and indeed has taken HD video from the surface of Mars - but only on a few very specific, very select and very rare occasions, for the same reasons - the quantity of data it's possible to return from deep space is a massive, massive constraint. Kaguya at lunar distances was capable of, and indeed did return many HD movies of the moon where the data rate doesn't represent such a constraint ( typical downlink from lunar orbit is more than 2,000 times faster than Rosetta right now.