Why didn't the harpoons fire?
Why didn't the harpoons fire?
Adrian Edwards
Gabriel Foster
I blame the Jews.
Jackson Jones
it was launched assuming the dirty snowball theory was correct
Adrian Scott
no landwhales on a comet
Christopher Turner
Something something niggers?
Thomas Ramirez
The harpoon propellent used nitrocellulose [flash paper], which was discovered to be unreliable in a vacuum in 2013, 8 years after the Rosetta mission launched. They knew Philae was fucked a year before she was supposed to land.
ing.dk
Gavin Jackson
The harpoons not firing may well have saved Philae's life. They were designed to anchor the spacecraft assuming comets had a snow/dust-like texture (with a possible thin ice crust), not hard ice. Had they fired, they could have bounced back and damaged the lander.
A big concerns of esa was actually that philae would sink into meters of very thin dust. The properties of the surface were very unexpected, but now, knowing that, we'll we able to better design future surface mission to comets.
Landon Hill
Electric universe people, please go die. It's pure pseudoscience. There were no lightning bolts, the comet is unmagnetized and it's not dense enough to be rock. Meanwhile ice has been confirmed sub-surface and exposed.
Aaron Cruz
You are the first person to mention electricity
Grayson Clark
Don't play stupid. "dirty snowball theory" is a big give away.
Joseph Miller
>And somehow that stopped the mechanism from firing at all.
Joshua Perez
What precisely does that have to do with electric universe?
Jeremiah Gray
I didn't get that comment either. Maybe ESA presumed comets would have more of an atmosphere, allowing the nitrocellulose to combust?
Camden Ward
Because it was planned to fail.
My uncle who work for NASA told me so.
Jeremiah Harris
It's an explosive, it doesn't need atmosphere to combust.
>NASA
Nope.
Andrew Phillips
This is bait.
See:
Gabriel Johnson
Because that term is almost exclusively used by electric universe nuts. Google it, even with google prioritising sanity it is half electric universe bullshit.
Matthew Robinson
>A big concerns of esa was actually that philae would sink into meters of very thin dust.
[citation needed]
Noah Cooper
bbc.com
Pretty sure it was here I read it.
Even if it isn't, have a look at it, the artwork is pretty sweet.
Brody Collins
They knew there wasn't going to be "meters of dust" otherwise Deep Impact would have excavated half the comet.
Noah Flores
I don't know, I suppose you can't infer much about the properties of the surface from a super high velocity impact with no data sent from the impactor (other than pre-impact data). If people at esa thought the lander sinking was a possibility, i suppose they had their reasons.
(besides, the deep impact flare was pretty huge)
Carson Jackson
>I suppose you can't infer much about the properties of the surface from a super high velocity impact with no data sent from the impactor
You would be wrong. The spectrum of the light tells you what was on the surface and under it. In the case of deep impact ice grains were observed. The crater size and impact photometery tell you about the surface and below that. Changes to the orbit can tell you about the internal structure but this is requires fine measurement. They don't send impactors for giggles.
It's not about the size of the flash at impact, it's about the crater observed afterwards. If it were meters of dust it would be swept away like it was nothing.
Nicholas Thomas
>bbc.com
Fascinating article indeed,... but there's no mention of the scenario you mentioned. You probably misread.
William Nguyen
Yeah no. The astronomer Fred whipple, of whipple shield fame, came up with a dirty snow ball hypothesis of comets. Although, we now know that some comets are really more of icy dirtballs.
en.m.wikipedia.org
Apparently it does need an atmosphere, to combust rapidly:
youtu.be
They probably should have tested such a mission critical component on a vacuum chamber on earth, but hey we still got some pretty cool science back.
Colton Thompson
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