Comets have been visited by scientific spacecraft for a long time, but what is going to happen tomorrow will be something that has never been attempted before: to actually make a soft landing on a comet’s nucleus. ESA‘s Rosetta Spacecraft has already been orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (better known as Churry-Gerry) since August after a ten-year-journey and on Wednesday, November 12th, its Philae Lander will hopefully set down on the comet shortly after 5pm CET. I’m not going to write much more about the mission here because there are better articles about it everywhere else, but instead I want to give just a few tips how to follow tomorrow’s events.

• Both NASA and ESA will provide live video from the event, with the ESA Livestream having already started today on 20:00 CET for 24 hours and NASA TV providing occasional coverage. The ESA stream has also been embedded on the Rosetta Homepage now.

• Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society is in Darmstadt at the ESA control center to cover the landing. She has already posted her immensly detailed Landing Timeline which really has all the information about what will be going on. She has also filed a first report this morning with fresh information about Phlilae’s status and much more. To follow her, the best spot are her Blog at the Planetary Society and her Twitter Feed.

• Emily has also put together a Twitter List with officially designated Rosetta/Philae Tweeters for all the up-to-date information which is very worth following and subscribing to.

• Nicole Gugliucci and Georgia Bracey from CosmoQuest are going to dedicate tomorrow’s episode of the Learning Space Hangout to the hopefully successful comet landing. The hangout starts at 8pm CET, about three hours after the landing. The Weekly Space Hangout on Friday is also probably going to have a lot to talk about Rosetta.

This is basically everything really important – I’ll update this post sometime tomorrow according to what happens, but everything else is now up to the two spacecraft themselves and the engineers behind them. Good luck Rosetta and Philae! 

[Quick Update: PHILAE HAS LANDED! Almost right on time the news came that the lander had made it to the comet’s surface. There are some concerns about stability, because the harpoons don’t seem to have fired, but the scientists are very optimistic and the lander is certainly working and returning data. For more news, see the above links!]

[Update 11/13: First surface images from the comet! Philae’s landing didn’t go all according to plan, because the lander actually bounced two times after the first ground contact and the final location seems to be in the shadow of a crater rim, but considering the circumstances this is still a phenomenal success. The latest press conference from today had a lot of detailed information especially about the newly released images.]

[Update 11/16: Because it finally landed in the shadow of a crater rim, the (first) life of Philae was unfortunately too short, but a lot of amazing science data was collected. I recommend reading Emily Lakdawalla’s last post about witnessing the remaining time before the lander went to sleep. There is a chance that the plucky little lander will wake up again, but for now there is still the Rosetta spacecraft itself orbiting the comet, which is actually the main part of the mission!]

It’s not so long ago that I wrote a previous version of this post, but this time I’m determined to write regular followups like this one. Tomorrow, the first half of Expedition 41 to the International Space Station, is coming home after almost six months in space and the station’s crew will be temporarily reduced to three astronauts before the next crew is launching soon and Expedition 42 is going to start. I just like to keep an overview on the crew changes on the space station and this time it’s going to be very interesting!

On Tuesday, the failure of Orbital Science’s Antares rocket with the Cygnus space cargo freighter was a harsh blow to space exploration, but on Friday even worse news came with the breakup and crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo during a test flight, resulting in the death of one pilot and serious injuries to another. Both accidents combined are maybe the worst event in spaceflight history since the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia eleven years ago, but unfortunately many people are already jumping to all the wrong conclusions.

Launching rockets into outer space has never been easy – there’s a reason it’s called rocket science. Occasionally things go wrong, often in testing, sometimes on actual launches. Rockets may misbehave by not going where they should go or even refuse to work altogether and simply blow up – that’s their nature and that’s what happened yesterday with Orbital Science’s third cargo flight to the International Space Station. The Antares rocket, all 40 meters of it, first appeared to launch normally, but then there was an explosion at the rocket’s business end only a couple of seconds into the flight. It was followed by an even bigger explosion when it crashed back to earth in a spectacular, but also rather terrifying fireball.

It’s finally happening,  but it seems like ages since Comet C/2013 A1 “Siding Springs” was discovered last year and everyone was very excited at first because it looked like it would actually collide with Mars. Fortunately, if turned out that the comet is only making a close flyby of the red planet, but this is going to be spectacular nevertheless. With a whole fleet of scientific probes around and even on Mars, humanity is still going to have a front seat without being too near the action. The whole spectacle starts at about 18:30 UTC in less than four hours and while we probably won’t see any images from the orbiters and rovers right away, we can still observe the comet’s encounter here from earth. Here are a few pointers with all the necessary information:

• Emily Lakdawalls’s post basically has all the links, including several online observatories which will be broadcasting later. It’s also recommended to follow her on Twitter at @elakdawalla because she will probably be live-tweeting the event.

• Universe Today has several articles up, but this one by David Dickinson from a couple of days ago is especially interesting because it describes how the comet encounter actually looks from the surface of Mars – hint: it’s enormeous!

• If you want to populate your Twitter feed with science, you can subscribe to my Science & Astronomy list and maybe in addition also to the Spaceflight list.

• NASA also has a lot of information on their website, including the infographic what is observing when at Mars during the comet’s flyby.

[Update 20.10.: All three NASA Mars orbiters are fine and the newest arrival, India’s MOM also seems to be okay. Now we just have to wait for news on observations – no new images yet from the orbiters and rovers, but that will probably come in the next few days when all the images have been downlinked. (It appears one image already has made its way to Earth!) And you can always check on Deep Space Network Now what the different radio telescopes in the interplanetary WiFi are doing!]

Because I haven’t been posting here much, here’s just a quick reminder that I’ve been constantly updating the Science & Astronomy Hangouts Schedule on the original post from August and lonks to many previous hangouts are still archived there. You can also join the WSH Crew Google+ Community (named for the Weekly Space Hangout) where this post is also available plus a Google Calendar which we keep updated with all the interesting hangouts.

The WSH Crew Community has been growing a lot recently and if you’re interested what’s new in space and astronomy you might feel right at home there. It’s much smaller than the big Space Community on Google+ and relatively low-noise, but filled with a great group of people who have been following and supporting what CosmoQuest, Universe Today & Co are doing for a long time. Some of the journalists and scientists involved in the Weekly Space Hangout have also joined and recently hangout organizer and host Fraser Cain has asked the community to contribute news stories to the hangout by posting them in the news section. This has been really popular and successful in the last couple of hangouts, making themeven more lively than usual in the last half. So you can join in and be a part of it if you want!

I like to keep tabs on who’s coming and going on the currently only human outpost in space, the International Space Station. Like every Spring and Autumn, it’s again time for crew changeovers with several of the half-year missions overlapping and ensuring that there are at least three, normally six but sometimes even nine astronauts on the station. Right now, there are only three up there, but tomorrow’s Soyuz launch will bring the crew contigent back up to six – and this expedition and the one that will be following it in November will be very special ones indeed. Let’s see who is coming, who is going and what other space traffic is in the vicinity of the ISS. [Image: Crew photo of Expedition 41]

It’s Music Monday and I really need something cheerful, so Meri Amber to the rescue! The self-described Australian geek songstress has just released her next album, the six-plus-one-track Super EP, last weekend and while I sadly don’t have the energy right now to write up a full review, I can only highly recommend it for groovy and catchy tunes with quirky and thoughtful lyrics and meticulous musical arrangements. Meri is so generous to let everybody listen to her songs for free on her music streaming page and several other streaming services, but you can also buy all of her stuff at very reasonable prices in her own online shop in the form of actual CDs (remember those?) and digital downloads, which are also available almost everywhere like on Itunes and Amazon. I really recommend the higher-bitrate MP3s, because they sound so much better than the streaming versions and it’s after all the best way to support her musical endeavours!

Embedded below is the very funny and creative video to the album’s title track My Superman and there’s also an album trailer and even a mini-documentary about the making of the Super EP!

Perhaps some visitors have already noticed those snazzy new icons in the top right sidebar – I put them there last week on all three websites because I thought the links to my social media profiles should be a bit more prominent now that I’m getting more and more involved in those. While my own websites are still my main headquarters and all the important content I post off-site will always appear here too, I’m not scoffing at social media any more and have actually found it enormeously fun and useful. So where can I be found except around here?

Google+ has rapidly become my favourite place on the web to connect to other people and share my content. My main focus there is on photography, but I always share all the links to my other blog postings too. The community and interaction is absolutely astonishing, wonderful and friendly – I’ve met some great people all over the world there. Rumours presist that Google+ is dead or dying, but after almost two years I now have over 4000 followers and over three million views on my posts and if that is not alive, I don’t know what is! Interaction is the key – writing comments, having conversations, joining and sharing circles and taking part in communities is what Google+ is all about. If you circle me on Google+, I will most probably circle you back if you post something interesting in your stream and perhaps give your posts some +1’s or comments.

Twitter was actually one of the first social media sites I mainly joined for fun back in 2011 and I haven’t really done much with it from my side except that I regularly tweet the updates from my websites by way of WordPress and only occasionally talk with people. 140 characters are simply not my thing, but in the other direction it’s almost entirely different – I follow over 300 people and enjoy my daily dose of tweets very much to keep up with everybody. I’m just not very good at this kind of high-frequency sharing myself, although I can certainly see the use of it as a communications tool. I actually have two different Twitter accounts: @guidobibra has the updates from all the websites, while I use @dvdlogger only as a legacy account for the DVDLog website.

Facebook has become more of a necessity than anything else. I have a few followers over there, but those are mainly family and friends who are not on Google+ and I exclusively post my website updates automatically from WordPress – although I sometimes write comments if I have something to say and will answer comments from others. This is mainly because I really don’t like Facebook from a technical standpoint – I hate the web interface, the official Android app is completely unusable and if it wasn’t for some third-party clients I would hardly look at my Facebook feed at all. I don’t intend to get involved into Facebook any more than I have to, so if you really want to interact with me, I would suggest Google+ instead – although I certainly won’t deny any Facebook friend requests or commenting.

Instagram is just a bit of fun for me than anything else. I actually installed the Android app to follow some other people, but because I’ve had a tablet with a very basic camera since last year, I have been posting the occasional crappy tabletcam shot there. It’s nothing really serious, I consider this throwaway stuff and the “real” photography will always appear on my websites. I actually like the Android app, but I have no idea if I will keep this up further because the tablet camera is a bit cumbersome. Although once I get a smartphone with a decent camera perhaps later this year, there could be more silly Instagram shots from me, so even if it’s still boring in my stream there, feel free to add me :-).

The first icon in the row is, of course, the RSS Feed which WordPress is still generating automatically and as long as the software supports it, I will continue to provide a feed. Even with the untimely death of the Google Reader last year, the format is stronger than ever and other services like Feedly have risen to the occasion and filled the gap perfectly. If you add my blogs to your feed, you’ll always get my articles as soon as they’re published here!

Okay, that’s enough self-promotion for now. I’m actually not really good at this sort of thing and I almost threw this article away, but sometimes you just have to toot your own horn :-).

About the Icons: Credit where credit is due – the four in the post logo are from Brainleaf Communications, I just loved that retro look and had to use this free icon pack in this article. The icons in the sidebar are based on a collection called Socialtograms put together by Steffen Norgard Andersen – I was trying to find something simple and was already half through creating some from the app icons, but these really hit the spot and I think they fit well into the websites.

Recently, my provider had updated the server my webspace is hosted on to PHP 5 and while at first I didn’t notice anything wrong, there actually was a creeping background problem: all WordPress installations refused to send out any emails and in some cases even timeout error messages appeared from the PHPMailer module.

After some unsuccessful digging, I found a post on the bugtracker of PHPMailer regarding an incompatibility with PHP 5.2 – apparently there is a problem with this particular PHP version related to the Regex function. So if you suddenly have those error messages, like a timeout in class-phpmailer.php on line 879 in the case of WordPress, check what PHP version your webserver is running. In my case, the server defaults to 5.2, but I was able to switch it with the line AddHandler php55-cgi .php in the .htaccess file to 5.5 and then everything worked again.

If your webhost supports this method of switching to different PHP versions, this will fix the problem – if not, you have to ask your webspace hoster to switch versions or install a higher version yourself. Reportedly anything above 5.3 works, but I only tested it with 5.5 and it works fine with WordPress 3.9.2 and the release candidate of 4.0.