Rosetta Mission

I can not judge neither the scientific nor the engineering achievement of the Rosetta/Philae mission. However, the biggest success of the mission so far I can confirm was a marketing achievement.

I have been hopping for something like that to happen for years and I am very glad that this happened at least. As an European I have always been surprised about how in every outlet we can read "NASA did this", "NASA plans to do that" almost all the time while at the same time reading close to nothing about European achievements and plans. Because I knew European already achieved, were achieving and planned to achieve some impressive shit too.

It seems that the mindset in the USA is to be incredibly proud of oneself and bragging about anything you achieved and share it live and passionately. In Europe the mindset seems to be quite different: be insecure about one's achievements, never brag about them, wait for your projects to finish before even talking about them, and when talking about them do it in the most formal, neutral and concise way.

If these cultural prejudices bear some truth, and I believe they do, no wonders why NASA is so popular and the ESA so unknown. And it is not just about ESA, the same goes on for other European scientific efforts. For instance, earth based observatories (VLT and ALMA anyone?), space based observatories (Gaia and Hershel anybody?) and particle physics - with the exception of CERN which is too big to ignore.

Granted that NASA did achieve much more than ESA: landing men on the moon, landing (and crashing) robots on Mars, space shuttle. But ESA crashes robots on Mars too! And would have done it as early as 1996 had not the Russian rocket carrying it exploded. But these are mostly part of history.

The rest is less impressive and on par with ESA. ISS is an international effort, the Hubble space observatories has ESA instruments on board and  the Cassini and Ulysse missions where joint NASA/ESA work. However, NASA overflows public with images, while ESA barely outreaches, not that it hasn't anything to show for!

Europeans, including scientists, don't like the spotlight and mixing PR with work, fortunately with the Rosetta mission ESA came out of its torpor to claim its fair share of fame in the world imagination.

The PR was brilliant:
- a very impressive (and costly?) short feature starting a recognizable major actor from one of the most followed series
- public engagement over twitter with live update as if Philae was an human. The account reached 330k  followers. Public engagement to choose a name and flying the winner to Darmstadt.
- news outlets reported a lot about the mission from the moment is was reported that the comet smelled bad. Such trivia is people's crack, but it really got people interested.
- the focus on the uncertainty of each operations, like everything could fail at any point yet suceeded, was catchy if not entirely honest

In a word it was entertaining, hooking and somehow inspiring.

As a consequence, people form around the world felt emotionally connected with the mission, and specially with the lander Philae. The fact that its batteries were about to die quickly made it even more alive. Even if money was spent not on science, the fame and connection if gained to the agency was totally worth it, because it will help attract talented scientists to ESA and Europe in general.

It is one of the most cruel lesson of life for shy task-oriented introverts and achievers like me and one of the happiest facts for bold people-oriented extroverts like slackers and publicists: what you did is not half as important to others as how you present it - event if you did great.





Now on the engineering side. I wonder. I wonder how they could be smart enough to make Philae land with the precision of about a meter and how they could not be smart enough to have it bounce rather than land...

Coming at the smallest speed possible seemed the best thing to do... with small downward thrusters to prevent gaining to much momentum, instead Philae had a big upward thruster to repel it back to the comet once it landed and would had started bouncing.

Also having Philae landing with just ballistic impulse of rosetta and no position correction is an astonishing feat. Yet it bounced, rather than landed. Strange that if they managed to get this right they didn't manage to get simpler stuff right.

Event technically... thruster not working while this is core of space tech and harpoons not working while this is super low tech that is disappointing. But the PR was good enough to make us not see these blatant failures.

Even when it "landed", it was said that one of its foot didn't touch the ground, there are three stable  realities that correspond to this: be on the edge of cliff, be on uneven ground, or more prosaically lying on the side. Good PR again ESA, keep it this way to make us dream even more!