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by jonknee 3572 days ago
> I looked at the pictures and the human eye can barely see the lander. Considering that the chances of losing these landers is not that low, I don't understand why they don't make them visually more distinctive.

If it was hot pink it would have made no difference, it ended up in a bad spot with limited solar power.
1 comments
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 3572 days ago
Finding the lander made a difference. Now they can put the the data into context (“[...] we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context [...].”).

ESA is lucky it had a high-resolution camera to distinguish the lander from the terrain. If you only have low-res cameras, it might be useful to have a visually distinguished lander so you find it despite of poor resolution (1 bright pixel).

A naive solution might be to make future landers reflect a certain wavelength and use a tiny camera that is tuned to capture that wavelength. Finding the lander should be much easier then.

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ygra 3572 days ago
But then you probably have a camera that has exactly one use – finding the lander – which doesn't necessarily yield the same quality of scientific results than having a camera that is more useful to the actual goals of the mission. Yes, finding Philae is nice, but not finding it wouldn't have been that bad, and the camera surely generated worthwhile data even without finding Philae.
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dredmorbius 3572 days ago
s/camera/filter or sensor/

You could probably have any number of multi-purposed systems for that task.

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jonknee 3572 days ago
If they didn't have a high res camera and could only identify the lander as a brightly colored speck it would not provide any "context" for their data other than it did not vanish into space.
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tgb 3572 days ago
The suggestion, I think, is to have both, under the assumption that one extra low-res single-purpose camera would be relatively easy to add. Once you find it with one camera, you can find it with the other.
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VMG 3572 days ago
> A naive solution might be to make future landers reflect a certain wavelength and use a tiny camera that is tuned to capture that wavelength. Finding the lander should be much easier then.

That's a complicated way of saying "paint it like barricade tape", isn't it?

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