Wired is excited! XKCD is excited! NASA is excited! Everybody on this livestream is excited! Also, if you go to the BBC website right now, you can try to land on a comet yourself, which seems like a very whimsical way to enjoy today’s news.
I Love It When Everyone Gets Excited About Comets
COMET COMET COMET.
COMET.
😀
Also, ROBOTS and SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE
YOU RANG???
spaaaaace, spaaaaaace, oooooooh it’s SPACE.
MUSHROOM
Excitement is the only appropriate response to landing a robot on a thing with virtually no gravity! It is nervewracking to follow along as the harpoons do or don’t or do deploy! Will it stay put? Will the product of a decade of waiting for it to get there just careen off into the abyss? Who knows! SCIENCE IS SO COOL. (And engineering you’re alright too, I guess.)
SCIENCE AND SPACE EXPLORATION LET’S GO (engineering is cool because we need them to build things to go to SPACE)
I’m probably leaving too many all-caps comments on this thread, but thumbs-up don’t quite cut it here and furthermore I don’t even care because SPAAAAAAACE!!! There is a LANDER on a COMET in SPACE!
I think everyone gets so excited not only because SPACE IS FUCKING COOL (seriously, it’s a cold cold place) but also because we’re so used to our news being full of awfulness (war, murder, misogyny, cuts to social programs, industrial pollution, etc.) that a big news story that is all about happy stuff is such a relief.
And it’s happy stuff about the best of human endeavour: curiosity and collaboration and engaging in the universe around us; taking a ridiculous long term long shot and getting it RIGHT. Great-spiritedness in the pursuit of science and understanding instead of horrible ugliness.
I think it took me five times, that game. I am not at all an expert of piloting a spacecraft. Sigh.
On a motherfucking COMET. Like a BOSS.
I’m on a comet motherfucker don’t you ever forget
Also, the guy who writes/draws xkcd is live-cartooning the landing, and it is predictably wonderful: http://xkcd1446.org
“Harpoons: Tricky.”
“Hang on in there Philae! MT @Philae2014: I’m on the surface but my harpoons did not fire. My team now trying to determine why. #CometLanding”
I follow Mars Curiosity on twitter and I genuinely forget that it is not a sentient being.
OR IS IT?!
omg all the probes were tweeting at each other today and i got a little misty bc i forgot they weren’t sentient
SPACE IS JUST SO MUCH
Meanwhile Sarcastic Rover points out that landing robots on far-away objects is the only situation in which engineers will hug one another and that all these successes are just a cry for human contact.
yo if it’s HUGS that gets us to discover ways to travel faster than light then LET THERE BE HUGS
LET US SEARCH FOR THE HUGGS BOSON.
(I have been making this joke to my boyfriend for years and he still finds it only mildly amusing. Philistine.)
Oh god, I wish it wasn’t called boson, it’s just… too easy. Way too easy! Must… resist!
Somebody was bitching just the other day about anthropomorphising it, but I say if it’s good enough for the folk who actually put it there, then it’s good enough for this lay person (and the lay person who was bitching).
But more importantly, it reminds of the two most adorable xkcd drawings ever, the last ones in the What If (The Earth Stopped Spinning). (Not sure how to post images here, but it’s a very interesting read, I think
http://mashable.com/2014/08/23/what-if-randall-mu…
Okay well now I’m crying about space for the second time today.
Yay, I’m not the only one who teared up a bit at it! SO MANY FEELS.
Aww that moon reminded me of Ghost 🙂
</3 Ghooooost 🙁
shooting HARPOONS into COMETS
That’s not a paddlin’.
In my freshman year of college, my second semester engineering class had a devilishly hard project where we had to computationally simulate launch and lunar impact of a shuttle, using real astronomical data to pick the exact point in the earth and moon orbits to deploy each payload. It was the most satisfying school project I have ever done, to this day. I can’t imagine how much more satisfying it would be to ACTUALLY LAND ON A COMET, like WOW THAT’S SUCH A THING!!!
Anyways hopefully kids watching this on the ‘nets or whatever decide they want to go into engineering is what I’m saying, especially the non-male and non-white kids.
That sounds like an awesome project. I would have been all over that and probably written a bit of code to handle some of the number-crunching. Heck, I’d still be all over that sort of puzzle. (One time I had a physics assignment with some very repetitive calculation and the directions said to show your work, so I handed in a printout of the Python script I wrote.)
YEAH SPACE THERE’S A LANDER ON A COMET IN SPACE go into engineering, kids, and send MORE things to space
Hah, I should have specified, it was mostly a coding project, albeit we used MATLAB and not Python. Though I hear you on the handing in code printouts, I basically refused to do repetitive math by senior year.
DUDE. That is a way more interesting project than “how quickly does the rope fall as the mass changes” type problems I got in undergrad. I rescind some of my earlier snark at engineering!
Woohoo, rehabbing the reputation of engineering! Though for full disclosure, the department overhauled all the freshman projects the year after, replacing them with uninspiring wet blanket projects. Alas.
Also isn’t it funny/neat/whatever that this is happening the week after all those articles commemorating Laika?
Laika will never, never not make me sad and feelsy. harpoon to the comet of my heart, Laika is.
Philae will also die in space but it’s a robot (despite all anthropomorphisations) so that’s ok.
I named my cat after Laika, sort of! Her name is Zhuchka, which was a nickname given to Laika by some of the people who worked on the mission. It means “Little Bug.” (Thanks Wikipedia!)
A COMET, YOU GUYS
WE DROPPED A FRIDGE-OR-WASHER-(DEPENDING ON WHO’S REPORTING)-SIZED ROBOT
ON AN ANCIENT PIECE OF ROCK THAT’S BEEN DANCING FROM JUPITER TO THE SUN AND BACK FOR WHO THE FUCK KNOWS HOW LONG
DROPPED A FUCKING REMOTE SCIENCE LAB ON THAT THING AND NOW WE’RE GONNA DRILL A BUNCH OF HOLES IN IT AND GET IT TO
A) STAY THE FUCK THERE AND
B) TELL US IF A ROCK LIKE THAT SLAMMING INTO A ROCK LIKE OURS MADE LIFE HAPPEN AND
C) PROB OTHER COOL SHIT TOO
AUUUGGGHHHH THANKS, EUROPE, FOR GETTING YOUR SHIT TOGETHER ENOUGH TO MAKE SOMETHING TRULY HISTORICAL HAPPEN!!! I HOPE PETTY NATIONALISTIC JEALOUSY SPITES US ALL TO ACHIEVE GREAT THINGS IN EXPLORING SPACE BEFORE WE DIE AT ITS HANDS
I LOVE SPACE
respectfully submitted,
with kisses,
carl sagan
Can we also drag the dudebro in the shirt of naked ladies??? Because I feel we should. For shame, dudebro, for. shame.
(NB: I’ve nothing against naked ladies or personal style in the workplace that isn’t misogynistic trash.)
So much rage. I hate when an idiot dudebro ruins a perfectly good comet landing.
IT’S LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF SCIENCE FICTION
EXCEPT IT’S REAL AND IS THEREFORE EVEN AWESOMER
I was watching the ESA livestream, it was so exciting! Now we’ve learned the harpoons didn’t deploy 🙁 and have to wait until tomorrow to find out if it really worked and the anxiety is building all over again…
And if you haven’t seen ESA’s 5-minute promo film for the mission, Ambition, get thee to YouTube. It’s really weird and awesome.
Speaking of anthropomorphising have you heard astronaut Chris Hadfield try to reassure a little boy who’s worried that Voyageur is lonely and in danger? He doesn’t succeed but it’s still adorable. http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/The+Current/ID/253…
Fantasy Canadian Space Uncle Hadfield, please report for duty.
(I’m sure he has his share of flaws, but he Skyped with schoolkids during their midday breaks and called it “On the Lunchpad.” Not quite #peakdad, but definitely #maxuncle.)
God tweeted “get your filthy probe off my comet!”.
I can’t pin down the WHY of it, but news like this about big steps forward in space makes me cry. Every time.
I’m just so happy for… the world? The lander I’ve inevitably anthropomorphized? I really don’t know.
It just makes your heart feel big, somehow.
Sam Seaborn knows why: Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.
Why would you do this to me
No shut up i’m not crying there’s a spacecraft in my eye go away
You said it right that time.
I swear, the folks developing landing mechanisms for these things are obviously very smart people and are super good at what they do but half their ideas sound like a 5-year-old playing with Legos came up with them.
“Annnd we put it in the middle of a bunch of BALLOONS and then it will bounce around and then the balloons deflate and then the science thingy will be OK because of balloons and it will roll out and do science”
“So we put it into a garage and then hook the garage up to a parachute and put rockets on the garage and then we drop it and the rockets will go and the parachute will go and then the OTHER ROCKETS go to keep it from landing and then the car lowers itself down on a cable because the garage has that also and then the car will melt the cable which will cut it and the garage will FLY OFF and CRASH somewhere else BOOM”
“And when we get there we’ll drop it and it’ll fall REAL SLOW LIKE A FEATHER and then whenever it lands it will launch ROCKET GUNS with cables attached into the comet and also there are also screws in all the feet and that’s how we will keep it there”
This is why I love scientists, though. Because they’re just the really excitable kids who were REALLY REALLY GOOD with their Legos.
And this is why we should encourage play and storytelling in childhood: because those kids who make crazy Lego machines may one day grow up to fire a robot onto a comet using harpoons.
You should read Andy Weir’s THE MARTIAN, which is basically nothing but that, and it’s awesome fun.
There is a communication delay of almost half an hour. They are landing on a moving object with a communication delay of half an hour.
And I thought hitting a baseball was hard. Hats off to you, geniuses.
I already posted this article on Claudia Alexander, the black, female project lead for NASA’s contribution to the mission, in the link roundup discussion, but figured it would be appropriate here too. It was published two days ago, so it also goes into the anxiety that results when a mission you’ve been working on for 15(!) years finally enters the landing stages, with no real guarantees for success available.
I absolutely LOVE that humanity’s collective response to the incomprehensible vastness and unknowability and mystery of space is “Fuck you, space, we’re going to come out there and climb over your various orbiting bits and slowly uncover all your secrets! It doesn’t matter how far away you are! WE’VE GOT ROBOTS WITH HARPOONS.”
And when giant monsters came through a dimensional rift in the ocean, our response was also “FUCK YOU, WE’LL MAKE ROBOTS.”
I’ve watched Pacific Rim too many times, I can’t distinguish it from reality anymore.
COMET MINING HERE WE COME
I didn’t tune in long enough to hear if anyone was actually chanting E-S-A! E-S-A!, but I did detect a certain amount of gloating that the Europeans were the ones getting their act together to do this, and not NASA. And quite right too.
They did not. Does NASA chant USA when they complete a mission?
it’s cooperative. ESA and NASA are sharing expertise.
OH I SEE first it’s like “Europeans your washing machines are too small and you suck” but when it’s landing on comets its “we”? I SEE. *european glare*
Your washing machines are too small for laundry, but just the right size to land on a comet.
We landed on a comet! Using a robot with harpoons! I love living in the future.
I’m so glad everyone is as excited as I am on here. I made the mistake of scrolling into the comments on the Guardian’s short report on how this was a ‘a human ingenuity triumph’ (which is a horrible phrase grammatically, but whatever) and everyone was just so down on it.
Choice responses include:
“Honestly, has the confirmation of the Higgs Boson changed the rate of Tax we all have to pay or the price of fuel? If not – please desist from making fallacious announcement that goes something like “THIS WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!” It’s blatantly so untrue – oh scientists high on your success”
“Tremendous achievement for the human race. But why can’t we gaol a few thieving bankers here on Earth? That’s one ‘mission impossible’ I suppose.”
I mean, I know these things are true but COME ON, we landed something man-made ON A COMET OVER 50 MILLION KM AWAY!
How do they know it won’t have any practical, world-changing effects? Aside from the wonder of “we landed a robot on a comet using harpoons,” who knows what technological changes this will inspire? Microwave ovens and computer chips, man.
One of those moments has me feeling like this:
I may or may not have spent 30-40 minutes in each of my Intro Oceanography, Advanced Oceanography, and Marine Geology classes today nerding out about comets to the poor students. I regret nothing.
Nor should you, but I do wish that we spent more money and effort into studying the oceans; we know more about space than about our oceans, we depend on them for survival, and they’re in serious trouble.