From wiki:

From the Wikipedia:
Dimensions:
Large lobe:
4.1�3.2�1.3 km (2.55�1.99�0.81 mi)
Small lobe:
2.5�2.5�2 km (1.6�1.6�1.2 mi)[2]

Mass (1.0�0.1)�1013 kg[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko

Yup, that's a big one!

Reports now that all may not be going to plan.

Apparently Philae bounced on landing. The harpoons failed to deploy and contact with Philae was temporarily lost after landing. This suggests it may not be properly secured to the comet's surface. There were plans for a press conference to show the first images of the comet surface but this has been postponed. However, one of the scientists just said they do have data coming in from Ptolemy - the system designed to sample the chemistry of the comet.

That was pretty expected, they're landing on a very fast object with effectively no gravity. I know they had claws and harpoons to secure the lander to the surface but without Bruce Willis what can you really do?

Hope it's still live and transmitting, it'd be a shame to lose the lander after a mission this long.

Maybe the harpoons struck hard rock and bounced off?

Man that would suck if they lost the lander after all that time money and effort!

Maybe one of the two harpoons will work properly?

No, the harpoons didn't fire, just like the cold gas thruster refused to thrust. It seems to be resting only by the comet's gravity pull. The auger screws can probably not properly secure Philae because of the lack of the pull of the harpoons.

That doesn't mean that the experiments cannot be conducted, but the position is much more precarious than it was planned to be ... which may reduce the actual lifetime of Philae on the surface from months to weeks or even just a few days.



Maybe they will try to reprogram the harpoons to fire once more. But I guess they will do it only after conducting the first set of experiments while the probe is still on precious battery power. Once that the initial run of experiments is over it's probably worth the risk to try once more. If it works - great. If nothing happens - nothing's lost. If something goes horribly wrong, at least they completed all experiments of the initial landing phase.

Just for you mate

Tigerwulf, you know just what we need!

That's great Tigerwulf, thanks!

I'm not very familiar with Star Trek objects as size reference! Could we please have an image with Star Wars objects to scale?

LOL! Just kidding!

Very cool Tigerwulf


Wheels

"That's no moon!"

Outstanding Tiger. Now that would make an impressive geek scale poster.

This should cover all your sci-fi geek scale comparison needs:



http://www.chartgeek.com/wp-content/uplo...el-d6lfgdf1.jpg

Amazing achievement! Especially when one considers that if this was launched ten years ago, the available technology for the build could be 15 years old. What did we have in 1999?

And here's the first image from the surface:




The full panorama is scheduled to be released at the press conference in about one hour from now.

Another comparison: with Los Angeles...

From here: http://www.iflscience.com/space/graphic-shows-size-rosettas-comet


Live broadcast on just now with more pictures http://rosetta.esa.int/

Now if only that was a live picture of Los Angeles

So...at last the smug has congealed into a single solid mass.



The Jedi Master