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Google Science Project 2015

metehanemlk
in Astronomy and Cosmology

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Nice project!

 

I am not sure I am understanding the failure of the actual mission though. Why did it miss its target?

 

And, you mentioned that a problem was it couldn't charge itself; how does your system fix this?

Interesting project indeed. Still, a slight bit of nit-picking to follow. In your video you said that ESA attempted a landing on an asteroid, while in fact it was a comet, which is in my mind is slightly more complicated because surface features of a comet, unlike that of an asteroid, are prone to changing and these changes can be rather fast especially in the vicinity of the perihelion.

 

Also the "failure" of Philae lander was not a result of poor landing accuracy, but a result of it bouncing off the surface twice. It bounced quite high, up to about 1 km above the surface, as a result of just ~38 cm/s excess velocity on landing. The main reason for the bounce seems to be that harpoons that were supposed to hold it on the surface were not deployed in time, so technically it has little to do with poor accuracy of landing.

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