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Philae

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Yesterday I heard a talk by Stephan Ulamec, who was the poject lead of
the Philae lander of the Rosetta mission.  When the topic was hotter,
various numbers for the number of RTX 2010 on Philae were reported
here.  I asked him, and he told me that there were two RTX 2010 on
Philae.  He mentioned several times in his talk that they were
programmed in Forth.

He also was asked and answered about the various things that did not
work:

They had planned to use Harpoons to secure the landing and avoid
bouncing back.  Both Harpoons did not work, and they believe that the
reason is that the nitrocellulosis for shooting the harpoons had
degraded; they had some of that stuff on Earth, stored in vacuum,
tried it after 8 years, and they did not fire with the original mode
of operation: the ignition wire made out of tungsten melted before the
nitrocellulis ignited.  They tried another mode of operation (half the
ignition current through both of the harpoons at once), and it worked
on their reference objects in ten tests.  They used that on Philae,
but the harpoons failed; they still believe it was this problem.

Another problem that happened was that the communication with Philae
did not work properly after landing.  They made contact with Philae
only 8 times.  Before the talk yesterday what I had read indicated
that Philae suffered from a lack of light to power it.  But they now
believe that, in addition, the coldness has damaged the radio
transmission system, e.g., by causing a loose connection.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
     New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
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Philae anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2017-04-05 14:27 +0000
  Re: Philae Darin Murphy <murphy.darin@gmail.com> - 2017-04-05 18:38 +0000
  Re: Philae Bernd Paysan <bernd@net2o.de> - 2017-05-01 01:11 +0000

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