So a robot landed on a comet this week. Actually landed, bounced twice off the surface (once almost a kilometer up, which still blows my mind when I say it out loud), and came to rest somewhere near a cliff wall it definitely wasn't supposed to be near. Philae, the little lander that hitched a ride on the Rosetta probe for ten years and 6.4 billion kilometers, touched down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Wednesday. I had ESA's livestream open in a tab all afternoon while I was supposed to be doing actual work, and when the confirmation signal came through (twenty-eight minutes late, because thats how long it takes light to get here from that far out) the control room in Darmstadt just erupted. Grown adults hugging each other. I got a little choked up at my desk, not gonna lie.
Here's the part that actually worries me though: the harpoons that were supposed to anchor Philae to the surface didn't fire. So instead of locking in place, the lander bounced. Twice. It's now sitting in the shadow of what they think is a cliff or crater wall, which means its solar panels aren't getting nearly enough sunlight. The team is saying they might only get 60-ish hours of battery life out of it before it goes dark, versus the months of operation they were hoping for. They're trying to squeeze every bit of science out of it right now while they can, drilling and sniffing the surface chemistry and all that. I really hope they get something out of it before the lights go out, because the idea of building something for a decade, flying it half a billion miles past Mars, and having it die of shade within three days is the kind of cosmic joke that only space exploration seems capable of pulling.
Now, the thing I actually want to talk about is dumber and more annoying than orbital mechanics.
During the live broadcast, one of the Rosetta mission scientists, Dr. Matt Taylor, did interviews wearing a bowling shirt covered in cartoon women in lingerie holding guns. On the day his team landed a probe on a comet. On camera. Broadcast to the whole world. And within about an hour Twitter had turned into exactly what you'd expect — a pile-on, a counter pile-on, "its just a shirt" versus "read the room," the whole cycle spinning up in real time while the actual news (a comet landing, an genuinely enormous scientific achievement) was still happening in the same room.
I'll just say what I think instead of pretending Im neutral about it: it was a bad choice, not because a shirt is some grave sin, but because the guy is standing in front of cameras representing an agency that's spent years trying to get more women into STEM fields, on the single biggest PR day that agency has had in a decade. Its not about policing what people wear to their garage on a Saturday. Its about picking your outfit for the one day you know cameras from every network on earth are pointed at you. That's not a hard call. I dont think he meant anything hostile by it, for what its worth, and the outpouring of anger at him personally felt a little disproportionate by Thursday morning. But "it was just a joke, lighten up" isnt really a defense either. Both things can be true, the shirt was a minor unforced error and the online response overcorrected into pure spectacle, and somehow that combination is what pushed one of the best space stories in years off half the front pages by the next day.
Anyway. A washing machine sized robot is sitting on a comet right now, 300 million miles from my kitchen table, running on borrowed sunlight. Ill take that over most tech news Ive written about this year. Im going to go refresh the ESA blog again before bed and see if they've squeezed any more readings out of it. If youve got a telescope and clear skies this week, 67P is nowhere near visible to backyard equipment, so dont bother trying, I already checked.