Sky_walker

You tried different browsers? VPN connection to another server? Live stream is here: http://new.livestream.com/esa/cometlanding ps. for everyone else - if you'll scroll down you can see previous highlights. pps. for me xkcd breaks more often than not :/

Seems like there's plenty of people who can't view it live, so... here is how it looks like most of the time:

Just hit F5 if you have problems with connection/routing/etc to the live feed. It works fine. ESA Rosetta blog went down. Web servers can't cope with the traffic.

It's metal surface, not painted. "Silver-gray", as you described it.

Interview on the live stream: http://rosetta.esa.int/ Landing gear on Philae has successfully deployed.

They got signal back from Rosetta - contact established with Philae. We should get first data soon (including pictures).

1:50 to the part about thruster. Readings are not looking good, but the final proof will be at the touchdown, when they'll try to run the motor. Without it - landing will be very difficult.

1 minute till loss of contact for the time Rosetta makes an escape burn. Contact will be regained at 11:58 CET.

133 194 people watching a guy standing in front of his desk.

Walter F. Mondale... that must be some important message if it's in a second line. But we can't decipher it. And all these words made of just one sign... they are so common, and all marked with dot... what does it mean?! We thought that dot means end of a sentence, but with deciphering this graphic... we are completely clueless what it means now. Seriously - next to some meaningless buzzwords - this is probably the most stupid thing I could think of when trying to teach aliens a language and make them understand written text. Actually, forget it - buzzwords would make more sense on that than the list of senators and committee members. Yea, that hand on the right side must have been the hint that helped you solve the puzzle, wasn't it? Cause I'm sure any potential Aliens would try to use it for deciphering the message. Especially when till now many graphics were illustrating a scale of an objects, so it must have been something quite small... That's one of the most confusing pictures in a gallery, actually. You know the context, so for you it's easy, but imagine for a moment, that you don't. You can't recognize humans (might as well by 3-legged robots) and these black things at the bottom - two look like a stones, or black plants, or some weird geological formations, and one black creature is touching these two things? Is it even a creature? Or... wait, there were some photographs about food - perhaps these black things ARE food. Good. We'll try it next time visiting Earth. In terms of photographs though, probably this one, bottom, is the most confusing if you don't know the context: Is that some secret US plan to get rid of the problem? (yea, yea, stupid joke, couldn't help it....)

Mandatory knowledge for any alien civilization:

It's your connection. Didn't boggle down for me since it went live.

NASA Deep Space Network is used only as a backup. Primary station used for communications with the Rosetta is ESTRACK station Malargüe. Gallery: https://www.flickr.com/photos/esa_events/sets/72157628037419233/ Live webcam: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Operations/ESTRACK_Malarguee_webcam

Oh, they put the stream up to the Rosetta website - http://rosetta.esa.int/ - includes the count-down clock to the separation. For the sake of ESA - it better would. Otherwise it's going to be a huge PR disaster for them, as it's pretty much the first such a huge event for ESA in a public relations department. (Sorry for being so pragmatic instead of looking at the scientific benefits, but having successful mission like that, right now, with public caring so much, will give ESA a strong argument to further increase it's budget) Eventually, yes, but overall it's relatively stable.

Stream is now up and running: http://new.livestream.com/ESA/cometlanding (though it might take a while till you see an actual content)

Philae landing live online stream is now set up & running: http://new.livestream.com/ESA/cometlanding

One larger, more solid debris is by far safer than dumping dozens of cubesats (or even worse than that: dumping pikosats/femtosats) on anything else than low earth orbit with short life span. [edit] Kryten got there before me

Not really a sci-fi, but.... they tend to be more interesting than sci-fi planets: http://www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Finally? Do you mean Proton never existed? Ariane 5 is also a direct equivalent.

Star Trek is showing a communist utopia. Whatever it's optimistic or not is a separate matter - but there were quite solid arguments made that world in Star Trek is closer to 1984 than anything we'd describe "optimistic". (google is your friend) Every Star Trek episode ever contradicts that statement. Especially in regards of shortsightedness. Cause you know, women need to be emotional beyond reason. Otherwise they can't make it to become a primary characters in the plot. (Water planet being probably the major example - man use logic, woman uses emotion, through good 90% of the whole sequence - heck: even at the ending, which is the most emotional part on the "man" side of the cast, main hero still uses logic most of the time, even when he is all in tears).

Neutron stars do emit visible light... and for that matter - they emit wide EM spectrum, so that includes some heat too. Whatever it's anything like this movie illustrates.... well.... that's a separate problem. Here's a photograph of a neutron star in a visible light: In any case though - you rightfully smell BS here. To my best knowledge - system with black hole and a neutron star would be deadly for humans. But hey... plot required throwing some fancy scientific terms, so there we go!

I disagree. I have seen it. Hardly. It's a flawed movie in many ways (especially ... ending nonsense) but it was a good movie regardless. It's worth watching if someone is into sci-fi movies, but I wouldn't recommend it for a plot alone. I very much disagree. His review is very good - he pretty much nailed vast majority of problems in a movie. Pretty much the only big problem I find with his review is that bit where he talks about a black hole in solar system - they call it wormhole in a movie, not a black hole. Buahahaha, ok, here I'll end this discussion here, cause we have obvious pathological case of a blind fanboism here. BTW: [spoiler warning] This star isn't visible anywhere in the movie outside of a mention in one scene. And it apparently doesn't produce any light - everywhere they show system illuminated by the matter spinning around a black hole (which creates it's own set of problems considering how close that matter would be to the event horizon - by far closer than the first planet - which has it's own set of BS if you try to calculate how far away it is from the horizon and what effects it'll have - but Phil's review already covers that) - the same matter that later shows up as an ice-alike dust - dust that miraculously avoids windows and humans o_O

Yes, that pretty much was the idea, combined with much higher angular resolution and brighter lens (OSIRIS has only an f/5.6 lens) it'd capture significantly higher amount of details. Dynamic range and though would still be a concern as you rightfully pointed out. Another edge that OSIRIS got is an option to change color filters at will. But sensor technology made an enormous progress since late '90s when OSIRIS was designed and in many ways modern cameras are much better than what Rosetta has onboard. Depends on an exposure time, distance to the nucleus, speed of a spacecraft in relation to the surface. OSIRIS got another limit in that regard that DSLRs don't - 3.4 second sensor readout time during which you cannot capture another photo, so it's not really suitable for making up-close multiple exposure shots.

Define "better". And typical camera would "suck" mostly because typical camera would die pretty much instantly in space. DSLRs are build to work on a surface of the earth, which makes task MUCH easier. But if you'd, say, sit inside of a manned spacecraft and take a photo through the cupola with a latest high-end DSLR - it'd work just fine, actually: it would give you better results than the OSIRIS.

And a few days forward we got this: Which pretty much is the last confirmation we'll ever need to cross it from the list of candidates for "the most realistic space movie".