Problem with that is there isn't enough gravity for your spider to be able to walk, about 1/10,000 g. Every leg thrust, no matter how weak, would bounce the thing up off the surface. Rather than looking all bad-ass walking around, your robotic spider would look rather silly bunny-hopping about.

Mass. Remember, this thing has taken a decade to even **GET** to the comet, if they had added more mass they very likely could not have reached the comet at all with the launchers available to them.

Actually the comet does not have enough gravity of its own to allow the spacecraft to orbit it, so Rosetta is in a solar orbit just inside of 67P. Since in that orbit it would quickly outpace the comet ESA has devised a generally triangular flight path that keeps it relatively close while enabling the best use of solar illumination.

There is no evidence that anyone is attacking printers via the route Mr Jordon found.

Yet. They left "yet" off the end of that sentence.

"massively expensive mission" my ass. One of their industrial tycoons spent more than the cost of this entire mission a few years ago on his daughter's wedding.

Back in the 1970s Indira Gandhi unveiled a program to update the Indian educational system, especially the higher education, with an emphasis on computing. The portion of the world that was not laughing at the idea of Indian computer programmers and technicians was berating the Indian government for wasting money that could have been spent feeding the poor. Today that expenditure of several billion rupees over the last few decades brings in many tens of billions of dollars in investment and revenue to India every year.

Americans now have such a short attention span that any investment that requires more than a couple of years for payback is unthinkable any longer. This is the real reason why Asia is today's industrial powerhouse, they don't hesitate to build a factory or power station that will take ten or twenty years to be paid off. American executives won't spend a penny on something that doesn't improve the stock price before they move to their next post in the game of 'executive musical chairs'.

In 1980 the two southbound lanes of the Sunshine Skyway were knocked into Tampa Bay by a freighter. Until the new bridge was constructed the two lanes of the remaining half of the bridge every year carried more vehicles in less average time and with fewer accidents than when it was four lanes.

Yeah, I didn't think so.

Thanks for that. One-stop shopping, rather than having to send people hither and yon.

Well then, give a link to some actual research that they (the deniers) have done. All that I've seen so far has been crap. The only ones that I heard doing actual research ended up changing sides in the debate.

And get rid of Daylight Savings Time.

If it happened in the US there would be an immediate assumption that it was a terrorist attack, even if it just plopped down in a cornfield, and the Pentagon would be invading someone before the first investigators arrived on the site.

Back in the '80s the Norwegians launched a sounding rocket. All the forms had been filled out, but apparently got lost on some bureaucrat's desk in the Kremlin. The launch path looked like a SLBM coming from the North Sea with a trajectory in the general direction of Moscow. The Kremlin wanted to retaliate for the assumed attack immediately of course, but Yeltsin made them wait until the full trajectory had been confirmed. The world had a close call that day. If it had been Washington down-range Reagan would have launched immediately.

In the case of the previous two, since they were traveling at right angles to each other they were pretty certainly not related. I haven't seen any examination of the path of this new meteor yet.

I remember proposals for robotic servicing of satellites in GEO when I was in high school, so that would have been the late-'70s, because it was not thought to be worthwhile to send humans to that distance. All of the satellite servicing missions NASA was able to carry out were done in LEO, IIRC the Hubble servicing missions were at the maximum altitude the Shuttle could reach. There has been some movement in the last few years to standardize on fuel inlets for GEO comm satellites in the hope that future refueling operations can extend their functional lifespan, but I'm not sure how far that has gotten.

NASA has wanted to do this for, literally, decades. I believe they first proposed this in the 1970s, and every few years since, but Congress will never appropriate the money. DARPA will have this money tomorrow, if they really want it. Makes me sick.