Kryten

If it was made completely of ice it'd fade away like the morning dew. Ice sublimates, non-ice compouds (the 'dirt' in 'dirty snowball') are left behind, forming dark, porous surface crust. This has been predicted for decades, is basically common sense, and doesn't even have anything to do with particle physics.

Pig is smart than baby.

If you were going that fast, you'd reach the centre of the hole basically instantly no matter how big it was. No surviving that.

It depends on the size. The problem isn't gravity as such, but tidal forces; the bigger the hole, the less force you'll feel.

They're still able to use most of the science for the primary mission. The battery has enough charge to support the full primary mission duration with no input from the panels.

It's a panorama with Philae digitally inserted.

Somewhere closer to the neck than the planned site. Rosetta is going to try to image it to determine the exact location.

I think we can reasonably assume a civilisation able to stop a probe moving at 10+km/s relative velocity can work out phonograph technology.

We've had telemetry for a good while, the issue is we're not sure what it's telling us.

Even with the comet's gravity being as low as it is, a bounce of two hours length would still require reaching a height of about a kilometre. They're extremely lucky Philae is the right way up.

They're part of the data on the golden disk.

Easy! 'Colour' is the perception of differing wavelengths of a narrow band of EM radiation, 'Sound' is similarly the perception of differing wavelengths of vibrations within a certain band of frequencies.

If they can't realise the interstellar probe is evidence of space travel, they're not going to be a threat to anyone but themselves.

I'm afraid it's a photoshopped version of this photo of a Philae model in a museum in France.

So far it looks like it landed, bounced to a small degree (resulting in power and signal strength going erratic), then landed again. Seems to be stable now.

Because Hayabusa landed on an asteroid.

You can't have a 'slingshot' from a stationary body anyway, not without breaking conservation of momentum.

Best to view here.

Sjould be two hours or more, likely a time zone mixup. They were saying about 7 hours of descent earlier, and release was almost exactly 4 hours ago

DFH-1 had no panels. That's probably Shijian-1, which was built from the DFH-1 flight spare.

It's only 1 million years, and the continents are still in the same places. Look at australia; that's not drifting, that's some kind of uplift or sea level drop. Look at the middle east; it's not split or distorted, it's just gone.

I have no idea what the heck is going on with this one; Obviously the first two are continental drift, but the last one?

I'm pretty sure he meant the release of Philae, in which case it's actually 09am UCT, which is 4am EST.

About 21 hours. The release of Philae isn't scheduled until tomorrow.

ILS was offering the flight at a discount rate, but nobody bit. They only withdrew that last year-there wouldn't be enough time to produce any sat of this size. This is going either to GTO or directly to GSO. Dumping cubesats into either of those orbits would be an incredibly bad idea.