Philae found!

Philae found!

05 September 2016

Less than a month before the end of the mission, Rosetta’s high-resolution camera has revealed the Philae lander wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Philae found. Credit: Main image and lander inset: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA; context: ESA/Rosetta/ NavCam – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

The images were taken on 2 September by the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera as the orbiter came within 2.7 km of the surface and clearly show the main body of the lander, along with two of its three legs.

Philae close-up. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The images also provide proof of Philae’s orientation, making it clear why establishing communications was so difficult following its landing on 12 November 2014.

“With only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae, and to see it in such amazing detail,” says Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS camera team, the first person to see the images when they were downlinked from Rosetta yesterday.

“After months of work, with the focus and the evidence pointing more and more to this lander candidate, I’m very excited and thrilled that we finally have this all-important picture of Philae sitting in Abydos,” says ESA’s Laurence O’Rourke, who has been coordinating the search efforts over the last months at ESA, with the OSIRIS and SONC/CNES teams.

Philae was last seen when it first touched down at Agilkia, bounced and then flew for another two hours before ending up at a location later named Abydos, on the comet’s smaller lobe.

OSIRIS image with Philae, 2 September. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

After three days, Philae’s primary battery was exhausted and the lander went into hibernation, only to wake up again and communicate briefly with Rosetta in June and July 2015 as the comet came closer to the Sun and more power was available.

However, until today, the precise location was not known. Radio ranging data tied its location down to an area spanning a few tens of metres, but a number of potential candidate objects identified in relatively low-resolution images taken from larger distances could not be analysed in detail until recently.

While most candidates could be discarded from analysis of the imagery and other techniques, evidence continued to build towards one particular target, which is now confirmed in images taken unprecedentedly close to the surface of the comet.

At 2.7 km, the resolution of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is about 5 cm/pixel, sufficient to reveal characteristic features of Philae’s 1 m-sized body and its legs, as seen in these definitive pictures.

Philae close-up, labelled. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” says Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta Mission Manager. “We were beginning to think that Philae would remain lost forever. It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.“

“This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is!” says Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.

“Now that the lander search is finished we feel ready for Rosetta’s landing, and look forward to capturing even closer images of Rosetta’s touchdown site,” adds Holger Sierks, principal investigator of the OSIRIS camera.

The discovery comes less than a month before Rosetta descends to the comet’s surface. On 30 September, the orbiter will be sent on a final one-way mission to investigate the comet from close up, including the open pits in the Ma’at region, where it is hoped that critical observations will help to reveal secrets of the body’s interior structure.

Further information on the search that led to the discovery of Philae, along with additional images, will be made available soon.

For further information, please contact:

Markus Bauer



ESA Science and Robotic Exploration Communication Officer



Tel: +31 71 565 6799



Mob: +31 61 594 3 954



Email: markus.baueresa.int

Laurence O’Rourke



ESA lander search coordinator



Email: lorourkeesa.int

Cecilia Tubiana



OSIRIS imaging team



Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research



Email: tubianamps.mpg.de

Holger Sierks



OSIRIS camera principal investigator



Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research



Email: sierksmps.mpg.de

Matt Taylor



ESA Rosetta project scientist



Email: matthew.tayloresa.int

Patrick Martin



ESA Rosetta mission manager



Email: Patrick.martinesa.int

Last Update: 05 September 2016

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Philae found!

The ‘Father Of Biodiversity’ Fears Trump And Nuclear War More Than Climate Change

Former Harvard biology professor E.O. Wilson is one of the most respected and revered conservationists alive today.

So you might find it curious that his biggest fear isn’t climate change or the ongoing mass extinction that destroys an estimated 150-200 species every day.

Nope. It’s Donald Trump.

“My main worry right now is that the Republican candidate might win the election,” Wilson said in an interview with The Huffington Post and its Hawaii partner Honolulu Civil Beat at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress in Honolulu.

Rick Friedman via Getty Images

Retired Harvard University professor E.O. Wilson, pictured here in his campus office, sat down with The Huffington Post and Hawaii partner Honolulu Civil Beat during the world’s largest conservation event.

The congress, which is being held in the U.S. for the first time in IUCN’s 68-year history, is the world’s largest environmental and nature conservation event and is often referred to as the Olympics of conservation. This year’s event drew more than 9,000 delegates from 190 nations.

Many in the environmental community would place Wilson in the same pantheon as John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Henry David Thoreau.

Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his insights into nature and how it influences the human condition. The 87-year-old is commonly referred to as the “Father of Biodiversity” for his dogged determination to protect plant and animal species and preserve the overall health of the planet.

In the interview, Wilson dismissed the notion of a Trump presidency with a chuckle, predicting the businessman won’t prove victorious over Hillary Clinton in November.

For that reason, he offered a second “greatest fear.”

“My main worry is nuclear war, as it should be for everybody,” Wilson said, adding it could come as a result of “some stupid mistake.”

“If we had a conflict with nuclear weapons use it would be horribly damaging,” he stressed. “So my main concern – notice I bounced away from biological diversity, because I am concerned about the human species too – would be nuclear war.”

 

Nukes aside, Wilson said climate change is the biggest environmental challenge facing the globe. Second to that is the loss of plant and animal species to extinction, which he said makes the globe less stable and is a “terrible, needless destruction of our most sanctioned heritage.”

The scientific community has overwhelmingly accepted the realities of climate change, including the role human beings have played in driving global temperatures.

Still, many, including a large percent of Republican politicians, continue to deny its existence. Wilson said he thinks that denial is not a result of ignorance but “willful opposition” by people who would be negatively impacted, either financially or politically, by efforts to stop climate change.

Wilson now advocates for setting aside half the Earth’s surface for nature so that it can remain undisturbed by humans. It was the subject of his latest book, Half-Earth, and his address to the IUCN World Conservation Congress.

Although the world faces many threats, Wilson wasn’t all doom and gloom. There’s been a shift in public awareness, which he said gives him great hope for the future.

“We’re going green,” he said. “It’s pastel green, but it’s still green.”

Nick Grube of Honolulu Civil Beat contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims – 1.6 billion members of an entire religion – from entering the U.S.

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The ‘Father Of Biodiversity’ Fears Trump And Nuclear War More Than Climate Change

At Aloft Hotels, Siri Can Control Your AC and Lights

At a select few Aloft Hotels, adjusting the air conditioning or turning off the lights is as easy as saying, “Hey, Siri!” Bloomberg reports the hotel chain has launched iPhone-based voice activation in its rooms in Boston and in San Jose, California (a stone’s throw from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino).

The rooms have thermostats, lights, and more that can be accessed through your phone or the in-room iPad provided. You can set mood lighting to preset options designed for morning, night, and movie watching. While you’re at it, you can ask Siri to play you some music, check the weather, or find a good restaurant nearby, though you could do that anywhere else you carry your iPhone, too.

Aloft’s Silicon Valley and Boston hotels are also the company’s test sites for its other high-tech “Project Jetson” initiatives, like a robotic butler named Boltr, an emoji-based room service system, and a keyless system that lets you open your room with your phone.

However, there are still a few hurdles before making Aloft’s hotels truly Jetsons-tastic, including the fact that equipping every room with WiFi-based controls requires big upgrades in the location’s bandwidth. One day the system will be compatible with Android-based voice activation, according to Bloomberg, but for now, guests who haven’t hopped on the iOS train will have to stick with the iPad provided in each room.

[h/t Bloomberg]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

September 6, 2016 – 1:00am

Shaunacy Ferro is a senior staff writer for MentalFloss.com. Her work has previously appeared in Fast Company, Popular Science, and Architect magazine, among others. She lives in Brooklyn and spends most of her free time taking photos of her cat.

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At Aloft Hotels, Siri Can Control Your AC and Lights

Logi Circle

Logitech has rebranded its general consumer products division as the friendlier-sounding, “tech”-less Logi for its non-PC-related products. The idea is for Logi to represent simpler, easier, more accessible devices, and its first home security camera under this name certainly fits those criteria. The Logi Circle ($199.99) boasts an attractive, cordless design, a very un-intimidating app, and two-way voice communication, making it something you can use to keep in touch with your home instead of just keeping track of it. Logi has added 1080p video capture and cloud storage for keeping footage for longer than 24 hours since the camera launched, though it still lacks a few of the more useful features you’ll find in cameras like the Editors’ Choice Piper nv or the Nest Cam.

Editors’ Note: This review has been updated to reflect features added since the launch of the product. The score has been changed to reflect those additions.

Design
The Circle looks more like a webcam than a security cam, though the differences between the two categories have blurred a great deal in the last few years. It’s a plastic sphere, about the size of a baseball, mounted on a small, cylindrical base. The front of the camera has a glossy plastic ring surrounding the lens, with a speaker grille surrounding the ring. An indicator light sits just above the lens, turning different colors to show its status. The camera can pivot up and down on its base, but it can’t twist left or right unless it’s on its magnetic base plate and charger, which you’ll want to keep it on whenever possible for sheer convenience.

The base plate attaches an eight-foot USB charger securely to the camera, making sure its contact points touch the pins hidden in the camera’s base. The magnetic plate also attaches securely to nearly any steel surface. With the plate connected to the camera’s base, I was able to position it sideways or upside-down in a variety of places our test lab an my apartment, including on wire shelves and under fixtures.

You can use the Logi Circle without the power cable attached, thanks to a built-in battery. However, it will only last up to 12 hours on a charge, so it isn’t feasible to keep it off of the charging ring for a long period of time. If you really want a wireless home security camera, the Netgear Arlo VMS3230 boasts a battery life of six months before you have to switch out its CR123 cells.

A small Power switch located on the underside of the Circle’s base is the only real physical control on the camera, with the exception of a very well-hidden pinhole Reset button on the back of the base. Besides the connection pins for the charger, there are no ports, slots, or buttons anywhere on the Circle.

Setup and App
Setup is extremely simple through the free iOS or Android apps. Turn the camera on, wait for the light to blink blue, then follow the directions in the app to connect it to your Wi-Fi network. I got it to work with both my home DSL network and the test lab’s FiOS network, though to switch from one to the other I had to use the Reset button to configure it again. Since, as a home camera, you’ll likely set it up to work with your home network and not bother changing locations, this is not a big deal.

The Circle app is very easy to navigate, thanks to a simple interface that focuses on a handful of unobtrusive icons and a scrolling wheel of recordings. All video is recorded to Logi’s cloud, so you can access it from any mobile device with the app installed (no Web portal is available yet). The main screen shows the live feed from your selected camera, with a series of time stamps on the right side of the display. Swiping down plays videos related to those time stamps, which are triggered and filed automatically when the camera detects motion. You can also swipe up on the list to generate a Day Brief, a compilation of clips from the last day showing what the camera recorded over just one minute.

Swiping to the left brings up the app’s options, which are relatively sparse. You can turn the camera on and off (or add additional cameras), flip the video 180 degrees (useful if the camera is mounted upside down), and individually toggle the indicator LED, automatic night vision, the microphone, the speaker, and even a Power Save mode to prolong battery life when it’s not connected to the charger.

The live feed includes audio, so you can hear whatever’s going on through the camera. The Circle also features a built-in speaker, so you can talk through the app to whoever is nearby. The voice communication is push-to-talk; press and hold the voice icon on the lower left corner of the screen to speak through the camera.

Logi claims an instant, real-time video feed with voice chat, but that’s dependent on the status of your network. Realistically, the Circle lags about a half-second between what it captures and what the app shows, and if you have network congestion or a weak signal with either the Circle or your mobile device, that can balloon to five to ten seconds. Fortunately, the app has a signal indicator to show if the camera is dealing with any network issues, and it generally kept a strong connection with both of the networks I tested on.

The speaker itself is also fairly weak. My normal speaking voice came out of the Circle a bit softer than ideal. It sounded better than a mumble, but you really need to be close to the camera to hear anything coming out of the speaker. Unfortunately, there’s no way to adjust speaker volume on the Circle, or microphone sensitivity through the app.

That’s the main weakness of the Circle: a lack of app functionality. It’s designed to be very easy to use, but that means many functions are out of your hands. It will automatically record video clips when it detects movement, and can send you push alerts, but you can’t manually set up specific zones or times for the alerts to be active. The most you can do is enable the automatic Smart Location geofence feature, which disables notifications if it detects that your mobile device is near the camera, or selectively enable or disable notifications for motion, low battery, and disrupted Internet connection. More manual control and some scheduling options for the notifications would really help the Circle work as a home surveillance camera.

Besides the mobile app, you can now access your Circle through a Web portal, a welcome addition to the service. The Web portal offers most of the same controls for the camera, and all of the live and recorded viewing options of the app.

Circle Safe
Video recorded by the Circle originally only lasted 24 hours unless downloaded to a connected mobile device. That’s still the case out of the box, but you can optionally subscribe to the Circle Safe service to extend the camera’s cloud storage significantly. Circle Safe records 31 days of video to your Logi Circle account, so you can access video long after you get a notification about an event.

Currently Circle Safe subscriptions start at $9.99 per month, and users can try the service out with a free 31-day trial.

Performance and Conclusions
The Circle’s hardware is capable of handling 1080p video, and as of a recent update can now stream and capture video in that resolution (it was limited by software to 720p at launch). Video quality is very good, though the wide, 135-degree lens produces an almost fisheye-like level of barrel distortion. The live video stream is dependent on your network connection, so it can easily develop compression artifacts. However, video clips after the Circle has uploaded them to cloud storage look consistently sharp. In normal light, colors are bright and vivid, and a built-in set of infrared LEDs combined with an automatic night vision mode showed all of the strange things my cat did (in green-gray monochrome) when I was asleep.

Both the mobile app and Web portal worked flawlessly, with only a half-second of video lag. Both were very responsive to navigate, and I could easily download clips or take snapshots from either interface.

Logi has answered several complaints and added much-needed features to the Circle since launch, so we’ve bumped up our score to reflect that. However, the Nest Cam and the Flir FX are each available for the same price, and offer more configuration options (the Flir FX also includes a microSD card slot for simple local recording). The pricier Piper nv, meanwhile, remains our Editors’ Choice for its ability to serve as a Z-Wave home automation hub on top of its already powerful home surveillance functionality.

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Logi Circle

How Artists Have Depicted Eclipses Across History

A total solar eclipse is one of the most otherworldly experiences a person can have on Earth. By an almost incredible coincidence, the the tiny, humdrum moon and the gigantic, raging sun are arranged in such a way so that the former can blot out the latter. Although the moon is about 400 times smaller, it covers the sun’s disc because it’s about 400 times closer to the Earth.

A small group of dedicated travelers follow eclipses around the world, chasing the spectacle of the blackened sun’s corona and the umbra, the conical shadow the moon casts over Earth. The community is tightly knit, bonded over the life-altering experience of losing the sun. Many “umbraphiles” are self-described eclipse addicts, having witnessed a dozen or more eclipses. Several gathered this week in equatorial Africa for an annular eclipse, and are already planning their itineraries for what they’ve dubbed the Great American Eclipse of 2017. Next August will be the first time the path of a solar eclipse will cross the nation since the year of its founding.

Midday on August 21, those fortunate enough to have a clear sky will see the sun slowly but inexorably consumed. A dark circle will slide over it, and the air will turn colder in an instant, as though someone had opened an Earth-sized freezer door. Warm air will stop rising from the ground and the wind will change direction, all while the umbra sweeps the land, making the sky so dark that stars emerge. Birds will hasten back to their roosts. At the moment of total eclipse, the sun will darken entirely, leaving only a halo of fire.

Order your eclipse glasses now, in other words, and book a trip to my part of the country, where we will have the best view.

“I would say most people still find it, in a way, a sign of some kind of providence.”

Of course, there is another, less literal way to experience the mystery of an eclipse. For thousands of years, people in cultures around the world have depicted eclipses in art, imbuing them with fear and dread and a heavy dose of the supernatural. A Chinese myth held that eclipses happened when a sky dragon dined on our star. In the Americas, the Inca had a similar tale, only the hungry beast was a jaguar.

In Western Europe during the Middle Ages, eclipses took on a dual meaning, and became a means for expressing varieties of both religious and scientific experience.

Georg von Peurbach, Theoricæ nouæ planetarum, 1423-1461



Science Museum / SSPL

“In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, astronomy and solar eclipses were a huge craze. Virtually anyone who considered himself an educated person then took an interest in art and science, in a way that doesn’t really happen anymore,” says Ian Blatchford, director of the Science Museum in London. The popularization of telescopes and printing presses brought astronomical knowledge into middle class homes, he says. It was also a time of discovery, with new planets like Uranus and Neptune brought into the celestial fold, as well as new moons around distant worlds.

By the time of the Enlightenment, eclipse artwork played a surprisingly important role in science, he says: “There are intriguing occasions when the artistic eye has been of real utility to the scientific process.”

An art historian who runs the UK’s national science museum, Blatchford recently searched the museum’s collections for representations of eclipses, for a paper on their role in the history of astronomy. He says he was especially struck by artists’ ability to capture the ethereal nature of an eclipse in a way that even photographs can’t.

“When an eclipse happens, you only have a tiny amount of time to observe what’s going on. But of course artists have a great skill of absorbing everything,” he says.

In early Christian art, eclipses appeared in scenes of the crucifixion to signify the anger of God and to represent the collective grief of the universe, Blatchford says. The Gospels tell of a darkened sky at the time of Christ’s death, which some scholars have interpreted as an eclipse. From Luke 23: 44-45: “It was now about the sixth hour and darkness fell over the whole land until the ninth hour, because the sun was obscured and the veil of the temple was torn in two.”

By the Italian Renaissance, paintings still held religious meaning, but their depictions of the sky and stars were drawn from early modern astronomy, Blatchford says.

Of all Blatchford’s finds, my favorite is a 1735 painting by German painter Cosmas Damian Asam. It depicts St. Benedict, who is said to have experienced a vision of the whole world “gathered together under a sunbeam.” This is a fitting analogy for a solar eclipse, but what astonishes me about this painting is its rich detail. You can see not only the eclipse, but the solar corona, and the so-called “diamond ring effect,” which occurs when sunlight streams through lunar mountains. Here it falls right on the saint’s head.

Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, has written that this painting may be the first accurate depiction of a total solar eclipse. He thinks Asam himself might have witnessed at least one, or maybe each, of the total solar eclipses that took place in 1706, 1724 and 1733. “In one picture, you’ve got a lot of religion and a lot of science,” says Blatchford.

Even after the advent of photography, artists played a role in capturing eclipses, he says. He points to this lithograph of a total eclipse in Wyoming in 1878, produced by a French artist named Etienne Trouvelot. It is less detailed than modern photographs, but arguably more beautiful. The lithograph leaves some room for interpretation, letting your eye and brain do the work. A photograph is more passive, simply collecting light through a lens.

Etienne Trouvelot, Lithograph in colour, Total eclipse of sun; observed 29 July 1878



Science Museum / SSPL

“Even in the 20th century, as photography improved, scientists still asked artists to accompany them on eclipse expeditions. They felt photography was still a bit crude in capturing the full magnificence,” Blatchford says. “It’s about the atmospherics you get. Really a long time after the first official photograph of an eclipse in 1851, artists were still valued for their insights.”

In 1918, the US Naval Observatory invited the American portrait painter Howard Russell Butler to paint a solar eclipse. His work depicted the corona, the glowing, wispy ring visible beyond the dark circle of the moon. The painting’s perspective work supported the hypothesis that the corona was the sun’s atmosphere, and not the moon’s.

In the latter half of the 20th century, artists’ depictions of eclipses were less important to scientific discovery and more important as a means of interpretation. For a cosmic event of such rarity and strangeness, an artist’s eye seems like a useful tool indeed. Though eclipses are well-understood physical phenomena, they are still imbued with mystery, and that’s something an artist can capture better than any camera.

Blatchford told me he visited an installation by the artist Michael Benson, who produces planetary landscape images from spacecraft data. A picture at his exhibition, “Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System,” featured a view of a solar eclipse taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Blatchford said from that perspective, it seemed impossible that the wee moon should blot out the sun.

“Even though rationally we understand an eclipse, I would say most people still find it, in a way, a sign of some kind of providence. They still can’t quite believe it’s happening,” he says. “Even if you know what is happening, why it’s happening is a different question, isn’t it? I think some of my colleagues get annoyed when I make that distinction. But I think most of our fellow human beings do make a distinction between understanding a technical explanation and wanting to look at even deeper explanations behind it.”

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How Artists Have Depicted Eclipses Across History

5 Years of Childhood Cancer Awareness And Counting

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness month and our color is gold. We gild our profile pictures and status updates with it in solidarity, driven to highlight the tiny warriors in our lives–the survivors, those still fighting and the dear ones we’ve lost.

The stories vary from child to child, family to family, connecting us from the moment we get that first, terrible diagnosis. They usually start with the words, “Your child has cancer.”

Ours started with the word “tumor.”

My family was initiated into this club five Septembers ago. Back then, I thought I was aware. I thought donating to charities like Make A Wish and St. Jude made me aware. I thought that since my younger daughter (I’ll call her E) had been through three surgeries by the age of seven for her cleft lip and palate, I was aware. Kids get sick, sometimes really sick. I’ve had to stay with my child in the hospital. I get it.

This month you’ll see many statistics laid out neatly in black text. You can read about them here, or here, or here.

Statistics don’t tell the whole story, so what I want to do is make you aware–just a little bit–of what it’s like to watch your child live with this devastating illness.

It’s important to understand that cancer isn’t just one disease. Its many forms and iterations are as unique as the children who get it. Cancer plays out differently depending on the age of the child, the type of cancer, the stage of cancer and the prevalence of the disease. That last one is important, because rare cancers tend to have much lower survival rates than cancers with clinically proven protocols.

So, for example, the 5-year survival rate for acute lymphocytic leukemia is 85%. The survival rate for juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (a much rarer cancer) is only about 50%.

The disease trajectory for each child varies greatly. Some children get treatment, go into remission and grow up. Some children die within days, weeks or months of diagnosis. Some children, like my older daughter (I’ll call her A), struggle with cancer for years before being categorized as terminal.

If you think the words, “Your child has cancer” are bad, try getting out of bed after your child’s oncologist says, “There’s nothing more we can do.”

For A, the disease has become the defining characteristic of her childhood. Diagnosed at 11, she was just beginning adolescence when we discovered the tumor. She has clear memories of a time before she was sick–memories that fade with each passing year–but these formative adolescent years are dominated by her illness.

How it lingers. How it forces you to change your life. How it feels never ending, intractable, unyielding in its demands–that’s something I didn’t get before A’s diagnosis. My limited experience with childhood cancer came from the brief glimpses I’d seen on the news or third hand, from people who posted fundraisers on social media. People rally around children who are newly diagnosed, they support the family with prayers, money, meals and more through the intense months of initial treatment, hospitalization and recovery.

Our children’s stories float into your awareness briefly, then swirl away again. I understand this. It’s so hard to live in this state of constant sorrow, of near desperation. Why would anyone want to stay here longer than they have to?

As we embark on our fifth year of A’s illness, it strikes me (yet again) how little I was aware of the hardship aspect of a disease that lasts for years. It’s not one trauma, it’s many. There’s no getting over this because it’s still happening. We’re still living with the reality that we’re probably going to lose her–that each season, each holiday, each birthday and all the small moments in between might be her last.

“This sucks, but I don’t want it to end,” my husband said the other day.

My daughter had a particularly rough August. She started a new oral chemotherapy medication–a last hope kind of thing–in combination with a medication she was already taking.

The two potent drugs are causing profound anemia to the extent that she needed a blood transfusion during the first week of August. She might need another one soon. Because her body is so depleted, she got strep throat and has been sick for weeks. Her mouth hurts from sores (a side effect of the medication). She’s tired, weak, and frustrated. She wants to travel, but we can’t go far. She wants to see Iceland, Thailand, San Francisco, The Grand Canyon and so much more, but we have to stay in New York, close to her doctors and to our support system.

I’ve never been an incredibly ambitious person. But now I’m finding myself envious of those with the means to travel. I gaze out my window and fantasize about booking trips with a private nurse at our side, sitting in first class so my daughter is comfortable, and taking her wherever she wants to go.

We’re in limbo and limbo is lonely. We can’t plan, can’t talk about the future, can only watch through the lens of social media as other families teach their kids to drive, send them off to college, walk them down the aisle…

Childhood cancer is holding us all hostage.

We live differently, but we haven’t stopped living. My daughter still goes to school. She’s still learning the guitar, going to parties, and going out with her friends.

Gold ribbons have an entirely new meaning for me these days–they are a reminder to cherish the moments and to share our children’s stories.

My kids, now 15 and 12, have spent the long summer days together painting, swimming, and playing video games. This is a course correction for them. A few years ago, all they did was fight. A few months ago, E wouldn’t come out of her room where she preferred the companionship of her computer and her sketchbook to her big sister.

The joy in watching my girls reconnect is overshadowed by the reality of this disease, but I’ll take what I can get.

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5 Years of Childhood Cancer Awareness And Counting

Philae Lander's Grave on Comet Found at Last After Nearly 2-Year Search

Philae (lower right) was found Sept. 4 in a shadowy area of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, marked in the image at left. The context of the landing zone is shown at upper-right.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The final resting place of the European comet lander Philae is a mystery no more. After nearly two years of searching, the lander’s shadowy grave on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has been found in images from its mothership Rosetta.

The European Space Agency’s Philae lander touched down on Comet 67P (as scientists call it) in Nov. 12, 2014, but its final location was uncertain due to the probe’s rough, bouncy landing.  News of Philae’s discovery comes just weeks before Rosetta – low on solar power as the comet moves away from the sun –  is set for a dramatic touchdown itself on 67P’s surface to end the mission. In a statement today (Sept. 5), ESA officials expressed marvel that they found Philae at almost the last minute.

“With only a month left of the Rosetta mission, we are so happy to have finally imaged Philae, and to see it in such amazing detail,” said Cecilia Tubiana of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera team, in a statement. She was the first person to see the images when they were downlinked from Rosetta yesterday. [Philae’s Rough Comet Landing Explained (Infographic)]

Philae’s landing on Nov. 12, 2014 did not go as expected. After anchoring harpoons on the spacecraft failed to deploy, it made a triple touchdown before skidding to a stop in a shadowy zone.

After nearly two years of searching, the European Space Agency’s Philae comet lander has been found on the surface of Comet Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko by the Rosetta spacecraft. Philae (shown in this close-up view by Rosetta) landed on the comet on Nov. 12, 2014, and was finally found on Sept. 2, 2016.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The solar-powered lander was forced to rely on batteries to do its work. It sent just 60 hours of data from the surface, but made several findings in that short time – including detecting organics on 67P. Philae only made intermittent contact with Rosetta before the lander’s mission was declared over this July, a year after Philae’s last signal was detected.

The new pictures show why it was so hard for Rosetta to get in touch after Philae’s landing. The lander is resting on its side in a crevice, with two legs plainly visible in high-resolution imagery.

This image from Rosetta’s OSIRIS narrow-angle camera is the discovery image that finally spotted the Philae lander (which we’ve identified in a red circle at far right, near center).

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Rosetta began its search shortly after Philae’s landing. ESA officials said that radio ranging data showed a suggested search area of several tens of meters. Rosetta imaged several possible objects. The team eliminated all but one target after the imagery was analyzed, among other techniques.

However, a closer look had to wait until Rosetta shortened its orbit above the comet, towards the end of the mission. Confirmation finally came in images from Sept. 2, when Rosetta was just 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) above Philae on the surface.

This annotated view shows how Philae finally ended up on the surface of Comet 67P as seen by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft on Sept. 2, 2016.

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

A labelled picture from ESA not only reveals Philae’s legs, but also some of its instruments and panels. Closer images will be possible when Rosetta descends towards the comet, ESA officials added.

“This wonderful news means that we now have the missing ‘ground-truth’ information needed to put Philae’s three days of science into proper context, now that we know where that ground actually is,” said Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist, in the same statement.

Rosetta – which isn’t designed to land on the comet – will nevertheless touch down on Sept. 30 in 67P’s light gravity. During descent, ESA plans to look at zones such as open pits in the Ma’at region, which could reveal more about the comet’s insides.

The orbiter’s daring end is similar to NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker descent on asteroid 433 Eros on Feb. 12, 2001. Like Rosetta, Shoemaker was not designed to land, but did so safely. While no images were sent after landing, the spacecraft continued sending data for two weeks after touching down.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebookand Google+.Original article on Space.com.

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Philae Lander"s Grave on Comet Found at Last After Nearly 2-Year Search