Philae lands in skull-top crevice: An engineering & scientific detective story
Astrophysics | 15/12/2020 | Organized by CarbonFree Conf | See recordings
This talk will present the results of a Nature paper published on 28th October which covers the discovery that 4.5 billion-year-old ice in cometary boulders (and in the comet itself) is super soft; softer than the milky froth on your cappuccino or the foam on the waves of the seashore. The porosity found inside the cometary boulders was equivalent to that found for the interior of the comet itself. I will summarise the work we carried out to prove that Philae touched down on skull-top ridge spending 2 minutes there slicing through the dust coating of two cometary boulders exposing their icy interior, and compressing both the ice and the dust in the location. It's an engineering and science detective story which touches on trajectory design, shape models usage, science image processing & analysis, cross-correlation of key science measurements from 5 different instruments, and an unexpected input from a spring-loaded magnetometer boom sticking 48 cm out the back of Philae. And it all started in August 2016 when I noticed a strange ice feature in two images taken as part of the Philae lander search campaign.
CarbonFree Conf (Organizer,Talk) > Introductory Talk
Posters: No | Recording: Yes | Proceedings: No | Number of participants: 50-100 people