Ah! thanks for this, I had no idea this existed . I have been reading Steve Squyres' - Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet for the past few months , and its pretty awesome. He gives a really wholesome perspective of what it took to get a ride to the Red Planet. I 'm going to read these journals kinda .. in parallel to the part of the book which explains post landing incidents.
A substantial chunk of ESA's budget comes through EU. So the cost of UK's membership in ESA might increase, as they won't be participating through EU anymore.
That's the kind of thing that is hard to justify to Brexiteer voters though... "Now that we're rid of the EU, we have a unique opportunity to pay more tax money to other intergovernmental organisations!"
"Some 20 per cent of the funds managed by ESA now originate from the EU budget."
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it seems unlikely that UK just won't participate in that 20% of ESA activities anymore. So they'll have to renegotiate the membership fee to account for that.
I'm sure they will continue, but as an EU member state working in the EU is much easier. Perhaps the skill levels will overcome any friction from visas and bureaucracy.
Its heart breaking to see these missions come to an end though they are all planned only for a few weeks in the first place. I m really glad that Philae came along this far , this was a really really complicated mission - Right from soft landing on the comet nucleus( remember the previous attempts in getting to a comet were impact probes) , loosing that one thruster prior to detaching from Rosetta , having troubles with primary & second batteries , going into safe mode , hibernating and re-awaking again , constant absence of sunlight to recharge batteries and all the delay in receiving signals back from Rosetta - This must have been one heck of an emotional ride for all the involved engineers and scientists. Mad Respect !
I m not sure if Philae conducted all the originally planned experiments or not , Would love for someone to comment on that.
And I love what message they had in the final video update, - now that they shut down the communication module of Rosetta that would talk to Philae - all those power would be used to conduct other experiments ! They managed to throw in some positivity there.
I thought the Philae lander was incommunicado anyway because it landed in shadow and its batteries ran down. Shutting off the system which is supposed to communicate with it doesn't really seem like a milestone.