The Approaching Landing

If all goes well, about six hours from now the high-tech lander named Philae will make history by being the first man-made object to land on a comet - the comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. As I write this, CNN is reporting that Philae has passed the point of no return ... it can't be steered or controlled, and things will either go well or they won't.

We'll see.

Scientists hope to learn a great deal when Philae lands on its target. After all, the mission to send Philae to the comet cost a great deal of money, which will have been wasted if the lander misses the target, crashes, or simply doesn't work once it touches down.

It occurs to me that this is much like the upcoming landing in Washington of the new Congress.

Some people spent a vast amount of money earlier this month (almost 4 billion dollars, if you remember) to send their own landers to Washington. As with Philae, we don't know what we'll learn yet, because most of the landers belong to the GOP and were not launched with specific plans or programs ... just a generic position that "all things done by Democrats are un-American and job-killing^TM". We don't know whether they'll actually work until they land on Capitol Hill in January and we see if they can work with each other and with the landers already there from previous missions.

Perhaps it's just me, but Houston*, I think we have a problem.

Have a good day. Good luck, Philae ... I hope you land safely.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

*Actually, the operations center for Rosetta/Philae is in Darmstadt (Germany), but you know what I mean.