Rosetta Comet Orbiter -** 120 Icy Patches ** Philae Phones Home ** Ceres Fly Over Video ** New Coma Discovery ** Picture MOTHER LODE !

Very cool stuff!!

The science presentation that followed yesterday's arrival programme is now available as a separate video, it really is much more interesting than what went out live yesterday.

[link to www.esa.int]

The video is all about the early science results, some gathered just minutes before the presentation started.

The highlight for me was Holger Sierks, leader of the Osiris imaging team talking about the surface of 67P. It has been know for some time that the surface of comets is predominantly dry and dusty so the question has to be answered, "where does the water come from". If you watch from 1:15:00 on the video you can see Holger describing a colder, brighter area on the smooth neck of the comet that his team have linked to gas production.

This would suggest that there are patches of exposed ices, or icier material, which is sublimating into space. This has never been seen directly before and this is just day one.

Other presentations covered flight dynamics, selection of landing sites, surface composition and gas production.

K

Amazing, thanks!

It's scientific Disneyland all the way now for at least the next year. If you listen to Fabrizio Capaccion, the VIRITIS imaging spectrometer team leader, he was suggesting that the neck may be colder, that would back up what the OSIRIS team were seeing.

There is such a battery of instruments on Rosetta and Philae that a year from now we really are going to "know" comets.

K

It's an amazing looking surface. This image:

[link to www.esa.int]

with the mountains to the upper left and right reminds me a bit of asteroid b-612 from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince.

[link to upload.wikimedia.org]

I have some ideas about these surface formations that I want to write about, probably tomorrow.

K

Meanwhile back on earth.........

For UK viewers, this Sunday's Sky at Night is all about Rosetta. Dr Matt Taylor ( tattoo man ) is on the programme, 23:00 Sunday on BBC4.

Here is yesterday's NAVCAM image.

[link to blogs.esa.int]

K

Here's a cool animation of the NAVCAM images

"This animation comprises 101 images acquired by the Navigation Camera on board ESA's Rosetta spacecraft as it approached comet 67P/C-G in August 2014. The first image was taken on 1 August at 11:07 UTC (12:07 CEST), at a distance of 832 km. The last image was taken 6 August at 06:07 UTC (08:07 CEST) at a distance of 110 km."

[link to www.esa.int]

Thanks for that !

I'm glad Philae is carrying two harpoons, so it can kill that damn thing before it gets near Earth ;)

The first NAVCAM animation was not as spectacular. 67P is that small dot in the middle of the screen that doesn't move.



[link to www.youtube.com]

K

Thanks for the heads up. Wish it wasnt on so late, but thats what the Iplayer is for lol

34,000 miles per hour? How come it takes 5 hours to fly from LA to NY?

Your unwillingness to pay $25,000,000 for a ticket.

Today's NAVCAM picture is the closest yet at only 83km from the comet.

[link to blogs.esa.int]

Look at that deep dish shaped depression on the head of the comet ( towards the right of the image ). That may be an impact crater or maybe it's an area that volatiles are produced from.

67P has virtually no atmosphere so there is almost no gas for light to scatter off to fill in shadows. When 67P rotates just enough for the crater rim to cut the light out, that depression takes on the appearance of a monstrous hole, 67P's engine maybe ?

[link to www.esa.int]

[link to www.esa.int]

K

It would have been insane to see a crop circle type formation in the middle of that LOL.

Here is a good summary of the the science presentation that followed the press conference on Wednesday.

[link to blogs.esa.int]

If you want to watch the presentation it's still here.

[link to www.esa.int]

Hard to believe that they have already started break new ground in the understanding of comets.

K

Is gold ever black?

Now that Rosetta has arrived at comet 67P, many of the experiments on board will be starting up. During the approach phase only the remote sensing experiments were active.

COSIMA is an experiment to collect and analyse cometary dust. At the moment, 67P is producing so little dust that COSIMA is going leave the first sample "slide" exposed for a whole month, just to pick up a few tiny dust particles. The dust will stick a 30 micron thick layer of gold on the slide. When this gold is deposited onto the slide, during manufacture, it has the consistency of smoke ( nano particles ). The layer that ends up on the slide is so porous it becomes very black in appearance, this helps to show up the dust under the COSIMA camera.

[link to blogs.esa.int]

The slides are then moved into a miniaturised mass spectrometer. Rosetta was originally going to be a sample return mission but during the development phase that became impossible. This meant that all the large and well equipped labs in Europe that were going to handle the samples had to be miniaturised and built into Rosetta.

[link to blogs.esa.int]

K

Here is an OSIRIS wide angle camera image of the coma from the approach phase that I was reluctant to post earlier, you can see why;

[link to sci.esa.int]

Although it shows up the density of the coma pretty well, it contains just about every type of digital image artefact too. Here is the original page with the briefest of explanations.

[link to sci.esa.int]

By way of contrast, here is yesterday's beauty shot from the NAVCAM camera from just 81km now.

[link to blogs.esa.int]

K

The odd comet coma image reminds me of something I read recently about the 1986 Giotto comet probe and the live television coverage of comet Halley fly past. Giotto was built by British Aerospace for ESA but Rosetta was built by DLR, there may be a reason for that.

[link to www.theguardian.com]

( <50% )

Viewers were promised the first ever view of the nucleus of a comet – the mountainous iceberg that evaporates to give the ghostly tails for which comets are famous.

The snag was that when the pictures arrived they were incomprehensible. They were garishly colour-coded, and not even the experts could interpret them. No one knew at the time the beauty of the comet that would be revealed by subsequent analysis.

Then, just around the time of closest approach, the signal from the spacecraft disappeared. The guests were left with no recourse but to speculate about whether Giotto could have been destroyed by the dust and debris coming off the nucleus. It makes uncomfortable, embarrassing watching even today.

But, if the stories are true, the damage was much worse than a few red faces. It is now a piece of space folklore that UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher was watching. She was so appalled by what she perceived to be a total waste of money that she began a severe tightening of the UK’s purse strings where Esa and space research were concerned.



[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

K

I missed where the voltage measurements
are coming from.

Hi Ghost Runner, earlier in the thread I looked at the electric comet idea. I asked the question, "What voltage would we need to zap Rosetta". At the time Rosetta was rapidly approaching 67P from a great distance. I was hoping some electric comet fans would make predictions about when the big zap would happen. I did a post about how we could calculate the voltage needed:

Thread: Rosetta Comet Orbiter -** 120 Icy Patches ** Philae Phones Home ** Ceres Fly Over Video ** New Coma Discovery ** Picture MOTHER LODE ! (Page 2)

So the figure in the thread title is the voltage needed to zap Rosetta today based on the most up to date distance measurements I have.

This week I have made a shocking discovery on the Thundebolts site that I will have to write about. It is related to Rosetta and 67P and will be of interest to any electric universe fans.

K

Are the ThunderDolts trying to weasel out again since there is no big zap up to now?



.

I think it's actually much worse than that, but I want to get everything straight first, so I don't write something libellous. I do think anyone who has bought any thundebolts conference tickets, t-shirts, posters, books, DVD etc. have the right to be very angry and should be queueing up to get their money back.

I never said congratulations to your countrymen at Astrium GmbH who were the main contractor for Rosetta ( even though we built it here in Stevenage ;) Astrium GmbH was the old Daimler-Benz Aerospace company and I believe the chief designer of Rosetta was also the designer of the Mercedes 240D diesel taxi from the 70's - here is why:

Rosetta has 9,600,000,000km on the original engine and is still going strong.

Rosetta was left out in the winter at temperatures of -200C in all space weathers for 31 months, then started up again first time.

Rosetta has an impressive chrome grille and hood ornaments.
[link to thinkinc.org.au]

The solar arrays make a very solid "clunk" noise when you close them.

K

LOL

.

Today's NAVCAM shot is another weird looking one.

[link to www.esa.int]

Near that deep crater shadow on the neck is an area of lighter coloured material. I believe this is the icier substrate that Holger Sierks, the OSIRIS team leader was talking about the other day. So there you have it, ice on a comet, maybe a first if that is what it turns out to be.

By now Rosetta will have turned onto the second leg of its triangular orbit of 67P. The traingles get smaller with each stage so Rosetta is actually describing a tetrahedron or "pyramid" shape ( what else )as it moves along.



[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]


K

3D Stereophotography enthusiast Dr Brian May has produced this excellent little 3D stereogram of comet 67P

[link to pbs.twimg.com (secure)]

My top tips for seeing this in 3D are

1 Sit at you normal distance from your monitor or tablet.
2 Don't enlarge the image, they work best being quite small.
3 Try and focus on a point twice as far away as the image i.e. try to focus through the back of you monitor.
4 If it works an extra 3D image will appear between the two existing ones, try and focus on that.

Too young to know who Dr Brian May, animal rights activist and astrophysicist is? He is the one with the guitar...
[link to twitter.com (secure)]



[link to www.youtube.com (secure)]

[link to cs.astronomy.com]

K

UK viewers, the Sky At Night is on now with Rosetta BBC 4. Pete Lawrence is doing a piece to camera while a huge fireball passes behind him, he didn't see it lol.

The Sky At Night has finished now, they played different music over the closing credits. It turns out Rosetta has its own theme song.

[link to soundcloud.com (secure)]

K

that's a curiously 'round' hole
in that specimen.

Aha, I thought you meant the Landing Phase, ON EARTH.

@ ME