Good night, Philae

A little more than three months ago, the author of these lines already began a note with the words "So, it happened." Let's repeat once again, on a different reason: "So, it happened."

If on August 6, 2014, after 10 years of flight, for the first time in the history of space exploration, the Rosetta man-made probe entered orbit around the Cometa Churumov-Gerasimenko (67p), now-on November 12, 2014, part of this probe-a hundred-kilogram descent of the PHILAE, the size of a washing machine-first sank to the surface of the cometary core.

This is not the first case of the contact of the comet and the object made by the hands of the person (recall the Deep Impact project). However, now this is not a copper blank, which hit a comet, but a softly hung robot with ten scientific devices.

And then the drama began. It was difficult to call the landing perfect. As Mark Bentley wrote, one of the planetologists working with Philae, the “European Space Agency (ESA) is unlikely to receive the Nobel Parking Prize.”

Firstly, the harpoons and the clamping engine did not work. As a result, the device twice bounced from the surface of the comet (for the first time-almost half a kilometer, gravity is almost zero), and only then somehow stopped. In addition, he did not fall into the point of J, which was then renamed the agilic - named the island, where, after building the Asuan dam, they transferred the temple complex from the island of Philee.

As a result, the probe stopped at the foot of the cliff and is in the shade most of the time. Therefore, solar panels did not receive enough energy. Without normal lighting, the probes could work only two and a half days, but the scientists decided not to wait so much. Scientific data came from the very beginning - from the plasma magnetometer Romap and the sensors of the properties of the surface of the MUPUS. There are already pictures from the Rolis camera, which received the image during the descent, six identical Civa cameras (Comet Nucleus Infrand and Visible Analyzer) work. Like a true hipster - the selfie Rosetta is well known against the background of the cow’s nucleus - Philae has already photographed one of its three legs.

But the work of the MUPUS penetrator was unexpected. The drilling turned out to be both successful and unsuccessful at the same time. Seven minutes of work, the inclusion of the impact regime of the penetrator - and it turned out that under Philae is a very solid soil that could not be pierced. That is - on the one hand, the soil samples were not especially received, and on the other, they received unexpected results. The comet turned out to be fluffy, covered with a kind of cigar ash, but very hard inside.

“The loss of data under the surface is sad. The discovery of a very solid bark is a great discovery that could not be made from orbit, ”the ESA reports.

After these seven -minute efforts, the probe discharged and fell asleep. The PHILAE team center wished the probe of "good sleep." In principle, there is a miserable chance that when the comet approaches the sun he will wake up again - but far from the fact that Philae will be able to survive the months of sleep. However, let's cross your fingers, but for now we recall the main milestones of a ten -year mission.

According to ESA, the probe was supposed to meet a comet outside the orbit of Mars and study the remains of the primary substance from which the solar system was formed. The mission was supposed to "solve this riddle." That is why the apparatus got its name: in honor of the famous Rosette stone, which allowed to unravel the secret of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. The descent device was named after the File Island on the Nile River, where an obelisk was found, which also helped to read the hieroglyphs.

The mission started more than 10 years ago, in March 2014 from the Cosmodrome Kuru in French Guiana. In the first three years of flight, he committed three gravitational maneuvers - three at the ground, in 2005, 2007 and 2009 and one at Mars, in 2007. The apparatus and about two asteroids visited. In 2008, Rosetta visited the asteroid 2867 Steins (this amazing asteroid has the shape of a robbed diamond), and in 2010 a fairly large asteroid 21 Lutetia (by the way, the first asteroid opened by an amateur astronomer). In the second case, it was possible to get a lot of very good pictures of the celestial body and even make its map. Then, in May 2011, the device “Locked in the hibernation” and woke up only in January 2014 from the internal timer. On August 6, the device reached orbit around the comet, and now continues to rotate around it - according to the Rosetta plan, along with the comet, it should approach the sun at a close distance and observe the birth of a coma and tail. The work of the device is designed until the end of 2015. Very detailed images of the entire surface of the comet have already been obtained - their resolution reached 0.3 m per pixel.

It is impossible not to note the excellent media operation of the project. These are wonderful cartoons about Rosetta and Philae, telling both the mission itself and the background of the study of comets, this is a short fantastic film with excellent computer graphics, and regular coverage of all stages of the mission in social networks and on various websites.

And so far we will refrain from assessments. In any case, the first landing on the comet took place. In the next release of the TRV-hunger, we will try to make a more detailed material about this stage of the mission.