Fire up the hibernation chambers!

So today's the 45th Anniversary of Apollo 11 leaving Earth for its historic voyage. This Sunday'll be the day it landed. I'm going to celebrate by watching the appropriate episode of From Earth to the Moon and In the Shadow of the Moon documentary (which I recommend to anyone who has yet to see it).

Apparently, NASAtv will be showing restored footage of the moonwalk at the exact moment. Also, they will be renaming the Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy Space Center the 'Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building', which is pretty cool.

Thing is, it was discovered a few days ago that comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko is actually made up of two (maybe even three) nuclei, making the landing of the probe a harder task. Exciting, though.

From the video, I swear I heard the announcer guy say the engine was a 108% when it blew. There's your problem

Anthony was on console in Mission Control when it happened. He described the atmosphere afterwards as "awkward."

108% probably means that at full throttle, the engines produced more thrust than they were originally designed and calculated too. Like, on paper they expect they'll produce 100 m/s at full throttle, then in real life they end up producing 108 m/s, then you end up with 108% thrust. Similarly, the Space Shuttle engines produced 109% thrust at full throttle.

Which I noted.

This is great news. I've this feeling that this is going to be considered an historic milestone in years to come. The kind of 'first' that's on the timeline of humanity's journey to the stars.

I think this is particularly significant because landing on a comet, aside from actually being pretty darn difficult, represents a key stage in their mineral exploitation (which we will have to do at some stage in our development).