Yes, We Can Locate Philae and Here Is How ...

[UPDATE: Philae is no longer able to perform experiments and is in a sleep mode. Locating it exactly does not seem to be a high priority task]

Phew! @ESA_Rosetta I am confident that our teams will find me. Wouldn’t like to lose touch with you. #CometLanding
— Philae Lander (@Philae2014) November 13, 2014

According to this New Scientist story, one of the people helping in locating Philae, the probe that just landed on a comet two days ago, says it cannot be found because "we don't have an algorithm for this' 

Let me be very clear: Yes we do. 

If you are that person at ESA or somewhere else, here is what you need to do:

• Please release all the photos of Rosetta and Philae on one of your servers. 
• we'll have (a few) state of the art people in computer vision and machine learning look at it and help you out. The Reddit Machine Learning crowd being one of them. 

If you are serious about saving one of the most momentous achievement in the history of space flight, please put the server's address in the comment section of this blog entry. We're the 12th Man, we're standing on the side and ready to help. Help us help you...

Attendant Reddit thread.

For instance, a series of low resolution shots, could be easily processed through the RASL algorithm.

h/t New Scientist for getting the interview, and BLDGBLOG for pointing out this issue.

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