The Gad About Town

A Straight Story

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

Most copies of “Tristram Shandy” by Laurence Sterne are about 600 pages long. (It is in public domain, so this varies.) The book is a fictional autobiography in which Tristram, the not-quite hero of a story that is not quite his own, attempts to tell us about his life from birth onward. However, he does not even begin to begin telling us about his birth and his first day on earth until the fourth volume because, like his own conception on page 1, his story is much interrupted.

(On page one, at the very moment Tristram is to be conceived, his mother asks his father if he remembered to wind the clock, an ill-timed interruption that, according to Tristram, produced an author who is incapable of telling a story straight to its end without breaks, questions, and digressions.)
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Landing on a Rocky Rubber Duck

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Mark Aldrich

Big news from the Rosetta mission, written about here in November: the Philae lander woke up today! The lander had bounced when it arrived on the surface of the comet and wound up somewhere in shadows, where it could not get sunlight to keep its batteries charged. Within days of landing, it went into hibernation mode with the mission team still not certain where exactly the lander had planted itself. Seven months of silence until today.

The comet, which is making its way towards the inner solar system and the sun, turned in the right direction, or more likely, heat from the sun melted whatever icy ridge was shielding the lander, and then sunlight found the lander’s solar panels, and the batteries recharged. The lander, which is a computer about the size of a refrigerator, rebooted and began sending messages to the orbiter, which has continued doing its job of photographing the comet. Philae sent information today that it had stored seven months ago in its last few moments awake, when it detected that it did not have enough power to send but could at least save the data, just in case it ever “woke up” again. Almost gets me in the feels.

The temperature on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is very cold, but the lander’s operating temperature was reported as optimal: -35ºC. (Same as my heart.) Whatever’s optimal, it is working again.

http://twitter.com/ESA_Rosetta/status/610047662856007680

An article: http://www.iflscience.com/space/philae-wakes

The Gad About Town

It took over a decade for the Rosetta space probe to travel approximately four billion miles. While not exactly a meander through the inner solar system—for several years it has been traveling at 34,000 miles per hour—its looping journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko actually led it be misidentified once, seven years ago this week, when astronomers noticed a previously unidentified asteroid heading our way. It was even given an asteroid name, 2007 VN84, before it was correctly identified and everyone laughed uproariously.

In August, Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P/C-G, its destination for the entire trip. Three times, the probe’s path brought it close to its home planet, which provided a gravitational swing each time to throw it farther away from the inner solar system. In one complicated months-long maneuver, it swung out by Mars, took a boost from that encounter to return to Earth at a faster speed, and then passed…

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