Simulating the bouncing of the Philae lander

I recently posted about SpaceTraveller, ”a solar system simulator and space mission visualizer program”  under development by BINARY SPACE (see Simulating Rosetta and Philae with ‘SpaceTraveller’). Here is an animation created with SpaceTraveller showing the Philae lander as it bounces twice on Comet 67P/C-G. The parameters for the first bounce were derived from the Rosetta images released yesterday (see previous posting). The second bounce uses a guess for the recoil velocity. Eventually ESA will find the lander and it will be interesting to see how close this simulation came to predicting where Philae settled on the comet.

For further info on SpaceTraveller, contact  info@binary-space.com.