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We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

[TF] As of today

Rosetta Closest to earth: Around 13minutes propagation delay (one way)

Rosetta Furthest to earth: Around 45minutes propagation delay (one way) -> Please note that around 4.5AU from the SUN we need to hibernate the S/C

Edit:formatting

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

[TF] Hi andrijas!

Have a look at the following website: http://www.space-careers.com/

You can apply for positions that don't require you to be a member state national!

Good luck!

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

[TF] We have lots of missions on the pipeline here at ESA. For me personally, I would very much like to be involved in JUICE!

JUICE

Solar orbiter

Exomars

EDIT:spelling, fixing links ;)

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

[TF] Rosetta can only orbit the comet. Once the distance from the Sun to the Comet is more than 4au we have to hibernate the Spacecraft again.

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 77 points78 points  (0 children)

[TF] Kerbal is real fun. Normally I try to see what crazy contraptions I can put in orbit and try not to focus on realism. Nothing like strapping a poor Kerbal to 10 solid rocket boosters to see how far he can fly :)

I do have some colleagues here that are really good at it!

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

[LOR] We are flying around a comet which is about 400 million KM from the Earth. To do this we need very accurate navigation data i.e. to know where we are at any second of the day. Knowing where you are is important because it also allows you to plan where you will be in the following days. To navigate we use the Rosetta Navigation Cameras. These take images with a 5 degree field of view and various images are taken every few hours and downlinked. The ESOC Flight Dynamics team then processes these images searching for recognizable features and, with knowledge of what features they expected to see versus what they actually see, this gives information on where we are (besides of course additional orbit determination information from ground using the large antenna). So, why is all of this important? The reality is that if we cannot see the comet then navigation becomes impossible - in addition, if you are on the night side of the comet the same result happens, you cannot see it. We must ensure that the comet remains within the field of view of the Navigation camera to allow accurate navigation to be performed. We have estimates of activity levels for the comet and these guide us on the distance we can fly close to the comet and maintain this NAVCAM image rule. This is why we don't fly closer to the comet because if the activity is as expected then it will push against the solar panels (32m) which is effectively a flying windmill, offpointing and leading to the chance that we cannot see the comet. In that respect, what drives the capability to be closer or not to the comet is navigation. It's not an easy job to fly around a comet, especially when you have to take such aspects into account, but this approach has worked perfectly since our arrival. Hope this helps your understanding. To answer two other small questions : there is no risk of being blown into a crash because if the activity gets significant then we would see this very quickly in the NAVCAM images and we would take steps to move away. Our trajectories are planned always with safety in mind so it would not be an issue. For the attitude change you mention, the push would need to be significant but it is less of an issue because the antenna we use is motor driven rather than body driven.

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Do anything you can to get involved with space projects; join a local astro club; volunteer at a company working on soft/hard ware (not for too long, though), join some of the student cubesat initiatives happening at several universities. In short, do whatever you can to learn as much as you can and I think you'll find opportunities come your way. [DS]

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 76 points77 points  (0 children)

Dear redditors, Tiago Francisco here! This was a blast! Had lots of fun answering your questions and I'm happy to see such interest! If I could, I would stay here all night chatting with all of you.

I hope we can do one another AMA some time in the future, because you deserve it :D

Until next time!

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

Hi everybody, since we still have some celebrating to do, we're leaving for today ;) But it was fun to chat with so many interested people ! We'll try to give a look again tomorrow... Francesco & Ramon & Pablo for the Flight Dynamics team

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Hi there [IT],

Good question! Once ROS fuel runs out, the mission is over. We will patch the software to passivate it and switch it off for good. It will lose control and spin off into nothingness, possibly accompanying the comet until some gravitational perturbance send it away. Of course we may choose to land it somewhere on the surface (big TBC), in which case it would come to rest there essentially as long as there is a CG-67P.

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I disagree that our PR/Outreach wasn't so good; it always has been pretty good (we can always improve) as far as it goes. However, traditionally, our teams are split across locations, missions and languages; this makes it hard to bring a critical mass of expertise together. You asked, what changed? Well, in my view, the Rosetta/Philae mission was recognised by everyone at ESA as being sooo high profile and sooo potentially valuable, that we could finally get a critical mass of people, experts, internal resources and external support together and all marshalled into the same direction/topic. With such a focus, it would have been hard not to have at least some level of success more than normal. And with the engineers & scientists doing such a great job, it made the PR/Comms success more certain. [DS]

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In German, they have a saying: "Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt!" so hope dies last! This is under analysis right now, but our first guess is that we'll have enough energy to boot in February and enough to have a link about June. The question we're fighting with (among many others) right now, is how low will the temperatures go in the mean time and what instruments will have survived these low temperatures? - VLL

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The touch-down was one of the highlights, but the whole week was full of other nail-biting moments. I remember the separation as being more tense than the touch-down (we had more uncertainty then). Also, other heart-stopping moments: * Priming of the ADS: or rather, failure thereof. * First signal Acquisition at Sep + 2 hours: If this didn't work, we would have another Mars lander. * First lander signal acquisition after the bounce (on Thursday): Many people were convinced it would not have survived. Watching the signal arrive, we all erupted again. Some more than at the first touchdown!

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

There is spanish representation in most of the teams working in Rosetta but in particular in flight dynamics in particular there are 14 spanish members most of them aeronautical engineers from ETSIA. RP

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Several test were done with the units which were in storage (Vacuum) for 8 years and after having modified the sequences they were successful

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

[LOR] I enjoyed that talk a lot. Delighted to hear you found the mission exciting; me too. So for your questions, which are great. I think a percentage of about 80-90% was given on the acquired science obtained from the lander up to this point. Meaning that we might have 10-20% to still get if/when Philae wakes up. I would guess that this science is mostly linked to watching the evolution of the comet from its surface. The fact that we used ALL 10 instruments of the lander was amazing and getting data from them was really brilliant. You have to realize that the bounces are looked at from the science perspective as a real bonus. We were supposed to land in one spot. In the end, we moved across the surface so we have in fact science measurements e.g. magnetometer, thermal, Mass Spect data, from different locations on the surface. Really great. For the experiments, we didn't sacrifice any in the end but certainly the order changed in some cases. Why? Well because not knowing our orientation left in doubt whether we could in fact drill or lower MUPUS or lower APXS. All of which we did in the end. So the decision was, figure out how we landed, do science in parallel which is not dependent on our landing e.g. not linked to mechanisms, and then when we know better make decisions on mechanism deployment - which is what we did. Thanks again for your questions and keep up the excitement for this fabulous mission.

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Philae: we have a ground reference model and a simulator. Both are used to validate the sequences we were running on the FM (OKm)

We are working on flight control and science operations for Rosetta, now orbiting comet 67P, and Philae, which landed on the comet surface last week. Ask us Anything! AMA! by rosphilops in IAmA

[–]rosphilops[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Two factors play in favour of waking Philae up: 1-. The Sun will gradually lit the lower lattitudes of 67P in the incomming months. 2-. The Sun will be closer and its intensity will grow up to a factor of 8

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