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Saturday, September 6, 2014

Rosetta & Philae Arrive at Comet 67P


It only took them 12 years to get there. They are hoping to actually land on the comet sometime this fall. It's kind of a trick since there is virtually no gravity, so the lander will need to grab hold when it makes contact. More here.
    The video starts with a billion-mile wide field-of-view. The planets are enlarged by a factor of at least a zillion to one, right? Which got me wondering just how far off are they, so I ran some numbers:


If the scale of the orbits is 8 trillion to one, and the scale of the planets is 2 billion to one, then the planets are 4 thousand times larger than they should be in this picture, which means that if they were to scale they would be smaller than a speck of dust. And if the orbits were the same scale as the planets, the image would need to be half a mile across. This whole space thing is really weird.

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