Well, at least photos of one closeup.
Let’s hear it for good navigation…time was we were just puzzling out how to rendezvous with the moon and get back.
Now we play tag with comets.
http://www.nasa.gov/
Rosetta has caught us a comet!
by CJ | Aug 6, 2014 | Journal | 52 comments
52 Comments
Submit a Comment Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
It’s interesting to see what a comet looks like up close.
Are we sure that isn’t a mud-covered Firefly? I see an engine pod.
It really is amazing. I love living in sci-fi!
Have to send Ben Pollard and company out there.
Thing about comets, they come in 20 mile widths and by the time they’re headed to whip around the Sun (or hit it) they’re trucking. An asteroid is a bit tamer beast on its apogee, while a comet headed for perigee is 26 to 260 mps. That’s miles per second. ISON, eg was clocked at over 67,000 mph and still accelerating.
I’m sure you meant aphelion and perihelion. (The “Super Moon” will near perigee on Sunday.) That’s Kepler’s 2nd Law, “Equal areas in equal time.” But apparently this comet’s perihelion is 1.24AU, so it’s orbital speed will be even slower than Earth’s (Kepler’s 3rd Law).
I was not thinking of -gee as ‘gaia’, which of course is its origin, but rather as any point of mass which anchors an eliptical orbit. But indeed -helion ‘sun’ is more precise with a comet.
The Beeb has an interesting article about Rosetta: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28659783
One of the headlines says they will orbit the comet, but the text says they need to fire thrusters occasionally to maintain position. And the lander has to harpoon the comet and winch itself down because of the near zero gravity of the comet.
Off-Topic Yet On-Topic for the Foreigner series:
I’ve newly updated my page listing the USA/CAN availability of the Foreigner titles in various formats.
NOTE: #04 (2.1) [i]Precursor[/i] is now available in Ebook formats in the USA and CAN markets. However, #05 (2.2) [i]Defender[/i] and #06 (2.3) [i]Explorer[/i] are still not yet released in Ebooks.
NOTE: All Foreigner series titles (#01 – #15) are now available in Audiobooks from Audible.com.
See Also: http://www.shinyfiction.com/cherryh-fan/foreigner/books.html
Precursor in Ebook format was released some time between my last update of the page in 2014-02-26 and now, 2014-08-07.
The two short stories, “Deliberations” and “Invitations,” are available as Ebooks exclusively through Closed-Circle.net by Cherryh, Fancher, and Abbey. Closed-Circle.net (Mind the dash!)
N.B. — I would be happy to create a listing for UK and EU markets, AUS and NZ markets, if I knew and understood the availability, at least for English editions. For that matter, I’d be happy to list other “foreign” language editions, if those are known. It might require separate sub-pages, but that’s fine.
THanks, BCS. That’s a lower case closed-circle.net I ask people to say it ‘closed hyphen circle dot net’ which is sorta rhythmic.
do you ever get asked, “Where’s the ‘circle’ key?”
i’m waiting for it.
You’re very welcome!
I wonder if the harpoons and winching will perturb her orbit?
The mass of the comet is about 3,000,000,000 metric tons, so any effect will be negligible. It’s like considering whether a mosquito landing on an elephant will knock it sideways.
I’d think it would be almost impossible not to have some effect on the comet’s course, no matter how carefully they calculate against it.
I should think also, she might be rather perturbed about the wenching, not to mention upset at any harpoons and other sharp objects aimed at her. Unless, you know, she’s a rather more venturesome, free-wheeling sort of gal, who takes that as a challenge and pays ’em back with a grin. I s’pose ye never know, do ye, matey? 😀
—–
I was asked to do a conference call for discussion and audition/read-through on the series for which I’ve been cast as a regular. I now know they’re envisioning a complete arc of six full-length audio episodes, about an hour-plus each. This may get done before the end of the year. They have one script in near-final draft and the others are being written. They’re very happy with my Russian accent. It means I may be doing more voice work in other shows besides, SF&F genre or possibly others. I am very excited and surprised at the level of interest I’ve been getting, as an amateur for indie and fan-based audio productions.
do not know yet if I might land paying gigs by applying to whatever voice acting studios there are in my city. I haven’t yet researched it. But now I think it has a much better chance than I did before. Continued good news is really, really encouraging. (Er, paycheck would be fantastic. Anything I do is the feast-or-famine creative stuff. A steady, regular income, simple improvement, would be a big step up.) I am excited in any case. This is *fun* stuff to do.
I’m told that Excelsior’s team is close to completion on production of one or both upcoming episodes. (I have a now-larger guest part in 402 and I don’t appear in 403.) I still don’t know release dates, but it should be this fall. In the odd way things go, 403 will be done before 402 is ready. But that’ll give their production breathing room for later. I was very pleased to get to do more work than they’d orignally planned, for the guest spot. This wasn’t “for me,” but was because the story needed something that felt like it was missing, to be a complete tale. That was just as satisfying as personally getting a bigger part, because the story and the series benefit from better storytelling. And these folks are usually very good at story quality.
Neat stuff! I’m thrilled. — When I know release dates, or more info, I’ll post. However, I’m going to expand my own blog, and attempt to post in some regular fashion.
It has to affect it somewhat. Even if you park a spacecraft NEAR another body it will have some effect, over time. Think of it as a dimple in the gravity sheet. And if you make a second nearby dimple, they become one distorted dimple.
This is one way the astrophysics people think we might change the path of a comet we map as intersecting Earth’s path.
The meteor shower we are now experiencing is the old tail of one of the recent comets and there are several others along our path. So we do meet up with comets over time—we just don’t want Earth to meet them up close and personally.
Comets shed an immense amount of material, rock and outgassed ice vapor, on each visit. http://www.space.com/19878-halleys-comet.html Halley did not make as good a show on this visit—it was farther from us than on other visits: see the article—but the same comet has been visiting us every 75 years for 2200 years, or 29 times *that we’ve noted*. That’s a lot of shedding. It’s now about 15x8k or 10×5 miles (it’s oblong) wide.
That must have been a pretty big nucleus to start with.
Indeed—that’s why the ‘park a mass and keep your relative position by the application of power’ theory can’t be done with anything like last-moment warning, which makes it fairly impractical in the present. Distance 🙂 as in years and years and years. Impacts on the way are also going to affect a comet—a comet likely does pick up a few dings over the years. But when a comet is way, way out there it’s not moving as fast as it does near the sun. If you’re dealing with a huge body, 10-20 miles wide, its acceleration near the sun would make the tractor option a truly forlorn hope. Frankly, if I were going to try to deflect something as massive as a comet, I think I’d park a mass driver on it and fling rock and ice off. The atomic device option might shatter a comet into a million zillion significant bits, which arguably could have an atmospheric heating effect falling onto the earth, as well as still making no few dings, tsunamis, air blasts, etc. I’d a lot rather encourage it into the sun if possible.
How about Mars? It’s never too soon to start terraforming. It’s a long process, though I don’t think I’ve seen a good article on how long.
Well, this is interesting, if’n you ain’t livin’ in Hawaii right about now: “On Monday (Aug. 4) at 4:19 a.m. EDT (0819 GMT), when Julio was still a fledgling tropical storm hundreds of miles off the coast of Mexico, Fermi witnessed what’s known as a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) above the clouds, according to NASA. TGFs rank among the highest-energy forms of light that naturally occur on Earth, and they can be produced by the powerful electric fields in thunderstorms, which is why they are sometimes called ‘dark lightning.’ According to the space agency, there are an estimated 1,100 TGFs every day. Previous research using Fermi data has even shown these bursts can fling antimatter into space.”
Neat!
We survived Iselle, but Iselle didn’t survive her fight with Madame Pele; Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa disassembled the hurricane quite tidily, and if you weren’t on the side directly facing it, mostly you got varying degrees of rain and wind. A few people lost roofs and there was some storm surge and flood damage, downed trees, etc. but if you must have a hurricane, this is the type to have. Meanwhile, Julio appears to have witnessed the ‘Hurricane Vs. Volcano: Fight!!” and wants no part of it; he’s veering to the north.
Excellent. There are some advantages to living on a volcano!
Glad to hear you did ok with Iselle, Chondrite. I was wondering how you fared.
Well, if we could start diverting comets and smashing them into Mars, I mean, we could possibly warm up those old plates and get it cooking. Toss Vesta and Ceres onto the pile. But Mars is half our diameter—a long road to get it up to size.
Venus, now: we have plenty of heat, there, and an earthlike size, so it can certainly hold atmosphere. If we could launch some carbon-dioxide munching machinery to float about the clouds chewing up the greenhouse problem and pelletizing the carbon or otherwise fixing it, we’d have a planet that could cool down in, oh, a *while.* A few cometary impacts to supply it with water—maybe to stir up that atmosphere—do something to give the poor thing a magnetosphere: it’s got a serious problem in that regard.
Someday we might do it handily.
NOoooooo. 🙁 We should keep Ceres and Vesta! 🙂 They must have a really impressive record of the entire solar system history! 😉 Get ouy there and “core” those puppies!
Oh, Venus? What do we do about the H2SO4 rain?!
Lol!
Wonder what happens to pelletized carbon combined with H2So4. I never was very good with chemistry!
Nothing I can think of. Reducing CO2 to C takes some fancy chemistry though. CO2 is pretty inert. It’s not CF4, of course, but the carbon is sharing two electron-pair bonds with each oxygen atom. They’re pretty tight.
let’s see….from Wikipedia, “Carbon compounds form the basis of all known life on Earth, and the carbon-nitrogen cycle provides some of the energy produced by the Sun and other stars. Although it forms an extraordinary variety of compounds, most forms of carbon are comparatively unreactive under normal conditions. At standard temperature and pressure, it resists all but the strongest oxidizers. It does not react with sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, chlorine or any alkalis.” I guess we’ll have to find another catalyst to get the sulfate radical to break up from the water vapor. Perhaps if there were large quantities of free copper available, you could make copper sulfate, which would free the water, but you’d still have the CO2. With the temperature of the atmosphere at 800 F, you’re not going to find any thermophilic algae or bacteria that could convert the CO2 to sugars, even if there were no clouds blocking the sunlight….well, not an insurmountable problem, but I fear one that is beyond our current technology. Of course, in 1903, we couldn’t have envisioned sending a probe to meet up with a comet, either.
Oh, but we’d had our magical mystery machine in the clouds separate the c from the o.