Rossetta’s mission to comet Cherrymarashinov-Garibaldi has been a rollicking success so far. One other way that it’s cooler than the moon landing is the perceptive organs that that robot has. First, it got a whiff of the comet. Pretty rank, is the basic descroption. I remember an Asimov story that had that description of space travel. The rookie was surprised that every planet they landed on smelled weird, and the grizzled old space pilot told him to suck it up and get used to it.
I don’t remember anything like that from the moon landing. Astronauts can’t take off their helmets, or they’ll die. Robots are just out there in the free air, or absence thereof, sniffing away.
Then there is this: the sound of the comet. Of course, they had to tinker with the sound, speeding it up by thousands, I think, or slowing it down or something but, essentially, if you were standing on the comet you would hear nothing but the emptiness of space. This is what the comet would sound like if we had superhearing. Still, it sounds pretty cool, and I’m sure it’s just chock full of scientific information.
The landing itself didn’t go as smoothly as hoped. It looks like the reason Philae’s robo-harpoons didn’t fire properly, thus attaching it firmly, buckling in for the long flight around the sun, is that it’s stuck in some kind of crevasse. Another reason for using robots. An astronaut with a broken leg is going to be pretty useless for anything, as well as being, personally, in extreme pain. The robot will just sit there in the crevasse, merrily snapping pictures of the inside of the crevasse, more or less oblivious to the facts that it’s leg is broken and that it’s stuck and not going anywhere.
Except, of course, on a ride around the sun.
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