Landing

Title text: [LIVE]

Frames of the comic began appearing at midnight (EST) on November 12, 2014 and updated every five minutes. Together, the images form a flip book which is shown here above. You can find the individual images by clicking on the latest image of the comic on xkcd (go to that by clicking the date above or find it directly at xkcd1446.org).

Explanation

This comic changes over time, tracking the progress of the Philae lander separating from the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe to land on a comet. More info about it at rosetta.esa.int.

The comic presents the imagined anthropomorphic "thoughts" of the Rosetta spacecraft and the Philae lander (and occasionally other parties) during the hours approaching separation from each other, approach to the comet, and (so far) initial analysis of data after the apparent successful landing on the comet. Beginning at 11:05:00, the comic includes a "Status Report" in the lower right corner which summarizes the status of various interested parties and accomplishments, beginning with "Rosetta", "Philae lander", "Mission Control", "Comet 67P", and "Have we landed on a comet?". As events occur in the comic, more status summaries are added to keep track of the changes to the situation and the supposed emotions behind them.

In many pictures a whale can be seen on the surface of the comet - often marked with a "?" as are almost all other parts of the unknown surface. There is also drawn a Cueball on the surface... Whales are also mentioned in the "Status Report" where they for instance may be listed as "calm" or "(probably) not in space". Dolphins and fish are later also mentioned there, commenting about the whales. The reference to whales comes partly from the fact that Philae brings along three harpoons, which on Earth have mainly been used to hunt whales; Randall previously brought up that comparison in 1402: Harpoons, suggesting that Philae was programmed to believe it was sent to kill the comet.

This could also be a reference to the scene described in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which begins: Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet. The passage discusses thoughts of a whale as it makes the inevitable journey to the planet surface. Another reason to believe there are references to these books is, that in another one of them, all the Dolphins leave Earth (before it is destroyed) and their last message to us humans is: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - which is the title of the fourth book in the series.

Shortly after release from Rosetta, Philae calls out 'Spaaaaaaaaaace'; this mimics the Portal 2 'Space core' who, on finally reaching space in the last scenes, gives the same elated cry.

The comic title was originally "???" (probably to not give away too early what the comic was about), but changed to "Landing" when Randall came on live at five in the morning EST. At that moment the title text also changed from "..." to "[LIVE]". It was also then that the timestamps' timezone switch. At 5:00 AM (EST) the timestamp in the picture naming scheme switched from EST to UTC as used in ESA's time keeping, resulting in a jump from 04:55 to 10:00 without actually any such delay between the two pictures.

There were however a few pictures with more than 5 minutes of delay (about 12 times five minutes without an update in total). The update seemed to have stopped after 136 pictures at 17:15 UTC, 12 hours and 15 minutes after the first picture. But later, sometime after 17:15 UTC, the counter for the last picture changed to 142, so maybe Randall has inserted 6 extra pictures later - however he must then have changed the number on the pictures, since the last picture is still the same now, but with number 142 instead of 136. It is thus now difficult to find out which pictures would have been added later. But even 142 pictures at 5 minutes intervals only spans 11 hours and 45 minutes, thus there would still be six 5 minute intervals without any picture.

According to BBC News, the harpoons did not fire as planned and the lander may have landed, bounced off, and landed again. This would explain the change in "Do harpoons work on comets" from "YES" to "Don't know" at 16:35:00 and the change in "Have we landed on a comet?" from "YES" to "Yes, at least once" at 16:50:00. According to The New York Times, radio contact with Philae fluctuated, which would explain the "Anxious", "Nervous", and "Confused" statuses around that time.

US Scientists presumably wake up at 7:40 EST (13:40 UTC) and say "Bluuurghhh. What time is it?" to indicate their tiredness.

There appears to be a brief error between 02:35 and 02:45, where the time until lander separation is shown as 1 hour, counting down to 50 minutes, before being corrected to 75 minutes at 02:50.

Randall credits https://twitter.com/elakdawalla in the xkcd page header, revealing the possible source of his near real-time data.