{As European team gives up on contacting Philae lander, mission scientist says he wishes they had made it easier to see.}<\/p>\n
Fifteen months after the European Space Agency’s Philae probe made a historic landing on comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Matt Taylor, a mission scientist, has told Al Jazeera that there are things the team would have done differently.<\/p>\n
In November 2014, the probe failed to lock itself onto the surface of the comet after its thruster and harpoons failed.<\/p>\n
Instead, it bounced off the comet, coming to land two hours later and about 1km from the original landing site.<\/p>\n
“Maybe [we should have] painted the lander [with] yellow and pink stripes to make it easier to see on the surface!” said Taylor.<\/p>\n
He said the bounce gave the probe the chance to collect more data about the comet, even if the probe’s mothership Rosetta was subsequently unable to find its precise location.<\/p>\n
“We have only been able to get within 20km of the surface to image the location of the lander,” Taylor said.<\/p>\n
“At that height the lander appears as only a few pixels in the camera, and the comet surface has numerous features of the same size, so it has been impossible up to now to unambiguously identify the lander.”<\/p>\n
Despite its unplanned landing, the probe was able to carry out a large part of its scientific mission and transmit the data to Rosetta, before its batteries died.<\/p>\n
Very hard surface<\/p>\n
The probe detected a number of organic molecules, previously not known to exist on comets, and also revealed that the comet had a very hard surface covered in a layer of dust.<\/p>\n
“Philae’s measurements revealed that the comet did not have an intrinsic magnetic field,” Taylor said.<\/p>\n
“This suggests that magnetic field may not have played a major role in the formation of small bodies in the solar system, meaning many solar system formation models had to be scrapped.”<\/p>\n
As the comet came closer to the sun, it became more active and the additional sunlight saw Philae’s batteries come back to life.<\/p>\n
This allowed it to transmit data to Rosetta, which was orbiting from a safe distance – but its last contact was made in July 2015.<\/p>\n
Last week, with the comet now moving away from the sun at a speed of about 135,000km\/hr, the team announced they had given up hope of contacting Philae and would stop sending or trying to receive data from the craft.<\/p>\n
As the comet moves away from Sun and becomes less active, the members of the team are focusing their attention on Rosetta and the first ever attempt to fly a spacecraft through the tail of a comet.<\/p>\n
“This will focus on the plasma interactions that occur there, the interaction of the suns outer atmosphere with the dust and gas coming from the comet,” said Taylor.<\/p>\n
After that, the team will gradually edge Rosetta toward the comet, which is now 350 million km from the sun, eventually carrying out a controlled impact in September.<\/p>\n
“We only had two options with the orbiter – turn it off or crash it,” said Taylor.<\/p>\n
“We wanted to get as close as possible, to get the highest resolution and best quality measurements, so crashing seemed obvious choice, so the finale is very exciting.”<\/p>\n
Source: Al Jazeera:[Scientist: Comet probe should have had coloured stripes->http:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/news\/2016\/02\/scientist-regrets-comet-probe-yellow-pink-160214103938759.html]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{As European team gives up on contacting Philae lander, mission scientist says he wishes they had made it easier to see.} Fifteen months after the European Space Agency’s Philae probe made a historic landing on comet 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, Matt Taylor, a mission scientist, has told Al Jazeera that there are things the team would have done […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2000072199,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[101],"byline":[2474],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-23234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","tag-internationl","byline-al-jazeera"],"bylines":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":{"id":2000072199,"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton23234.jpg","alt":"","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","width":0,"height":0,"sizes":{"thumbnail":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton23234.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"medium":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton23234.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"medium_large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton23234.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"large":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton23234.jpg","width":1,"height":1},"full":{"url":"https:\/\/en-images.igihe.com\/IMG\/logo\/arton23234.jpg","width":0,"height":0}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2000072199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23234"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=23234"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=23234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}