Finally, someone found Philae.
I think the lander cheated by somehow insinuating itself deep into a crack. Probably by pulling that maneuver it saw Han Solo do in Star Wars. Show off. It better watch out for mynocks, though.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Yikes. I’m glad it was able to get any sunlight to re-awaken, considering where it ended up.
Say what you will about the much maligned European Union: it will take time, but it will find a spacecraft lost 320 million miles from Earth and Apple secret cash stash.
It wasn’t Star Wars, it was Empire Strikes Back. :P
Kinky EU robot. Laying on its side in a bed of rocks arching a leg into the… vacuum.
If we JPEG-compress that picture enough, we can probably ‘uncover’ some secret alien blob technology.
Wait… are we on the side of the NASA coverup? Or are we just Big Pharma?
Am I the only one struggling with the scale? Every time I see the image I think I’m looking at sand or some other powdery substance photographed close up. Then I see Philae and everything shifts by a few orders of magnitude.
I’m not sure of the scale, but I’d guess it’s the oddly rectangular shape toward the right of the image? (Or that that oddly rectangular shape is a part of Philae?
Oh, yes, I checked the cheat sheet, and that’s it. How odd that people have been searching for it for years, and I managed to find it within 5 minutes! Clearly, this is proof (and evidence!) that I should get a job with NASA or the ESA (side thought: why isn’t it the NASA?) as probe-finder general.
That’s Waldo?
I thought it was Carmen Sandiego.
Yes. It is a matter of scale.
The photo is of Jabba the Hutt’s left cheek.
That’s the wrinkliest bum I’ve seen in a long time.
So where’s the Pokémon Go thingy?
Athywren@7: “the ESA”?
Here in the UK people who have regular dealings with ESA (I can’t speak for the man on the Clapham omnibus) seem to treat it as a name[*] pronounced /isA/ that can’t be further parsed, not as a contracted noun[*] phrase, so no article is required. For an example, see the previous sentence.
[*] Linguists have been observed to write entire books on how names are not nouns
@richardh, 12
Ah, so ESA are just as wrong as NASA? Cool. :P
So long as they’re consistent, I’m happy.
@mforkheim
It was Star Wars.
Star Wars episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back
learn your canon, nerd.
Also, the Osiris Rex Mission is launching tomorrow. I’m going to watch it live at one of our local breweries. I’m pretty excited about this mission, as it will be one of the first in a long time with a planned return to earth.
Waydude @14. It was Episode 2. Don’t ever mention the prequels in my presence.
As for those mynocks, I hear they like to chew on power couplings. That’s the real reason we lost contact with the lander!
I do not now recall where, but some days ago I was reading some of the readers’s comments on an article about the mission. Most of the comments were fairly sane, but a few readers’s were freaking out that this is an Andromeda Strain scenario. (At least one seemed to be a wind-up, but I’m not too sure about some of the others…)