Rosetta navigation camera (NAVCAM) image taken on 9 August 2014 at about 99 km from comet 67P/C-G.
View and download image here.
Full-frame NAVCAM image taken on 9 August 2014 from a distance of about 99 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM
Discussion: 24 comments
When the Philae’s Landing?
The working date is 11 November but this won’t be confirmed until a landing site and the flight path has been determined.
What is this object made of? Densities, from Wikipedia:
Comet 67P/C-G
102±9 kg/m³
Silica
2648 kg/m3
Water
999.9720 kg/m3
Ice is about 90% the weight of water. IS it hollow then?
There are quite a range of numbers out there for the density of 67P/C-G based on previous studies, i.e. before Rosetta arrived, but all are less than the density of water.
Definitive mean density values will be available soon, once Rosetta has measured the mass and overall volume of the comet.
But the general thinking is that comet’s are rather loosely-packed, porous structures, as the self-gravity is not strong enough to make the compact. So, not hollow, but porous.
Wonderful pictures!
But there much better pictures from the Narrow Angle Camera. These better pictures are lacking for quite some time now.
So it is time to show NAC pictures high res…. The world likes to see the comet on more detail!
Thanks for your help
Paul
Thanks for the interest. We’ll be posting more from NAC when we get them from the external OSIRIS science team. They’re currently very busy, working hard to put maps and models of the comet together to help with landing site selection, a process that has to happen very quickly now. Everyone’s concentrating on that mission-critical part …
Hopefully we’ll have some soon, but in the meantime, we’ll continue to post images from NAVCAM daily.
There would be virtually no work required at all to publish them here if they simply posted the “raw” images! I’m sorry, but the excuses for the “mine, all mine” approach to OUR data are becoming increasingly ridiculous. I have put this into the political realm now, and once the UK parliament is back in session, my MP will be asking the Science Minister to make UK contributions to ESA projects conditional on removal of the “proprietary period”….. I ask all others interested in science for all (as opposed to personal glory for a few) to make similar moves in their own countries.
Of course – based on past experiences of this blog, I challenge the moderators not to censor this comment!
Oops !
Tschuri is bizarrely shaped today…..
Beautiful, just beautiful!!
ET!
Seriously.
Another fantastic image.
The slight increase in distance, is due to the completion of the first ‘leg’ of the first so called Pyramid Orbit, which really is a Tetrahedron Orbit. Rosetta will start closing in again, from a different angle.
There are more boulders visible both on the head and on the ‘chest’ of the large lobe.
Thank You very much Claudia for giving up some time on your weekend to provide this amazing update for us. 🙂
Andrew R Brown.
Is ET!
Why are so few images being revealed to the taxpaying public who pay ESA’s bills? I watched man’s first landing on the moon LIVE, the moon-buggy’s ride across the lunar surface LIVE, etc.
ESA should provide similar facilities to its sponsors (aka taxpayers).
Drip-feeding the occasional image is simply not enough! They do not belong to ESA scientists, personally, and they should not keep them for themselves.
Hi Dave, we are very happy to be able to share daily images of the comet – you can find them under “CometWatch” if you missed some of the previous publications over the last few weeks.
Please also see Mark’s comment above.
Emily
…”moon LIVE”…
???????
…trolling?
This is not Ok,
so please delete me if offend some one…
This is big science,
not big muscle showing.
There’s a key misunderstanding here: Rosetta is currently just over 400 million kilometres from the Earth, compared to the 400,000 km distance of the Moon from us. That’s 1,000 times further away.
Thus all other things being equal, the signals arriving from Rosetta would be 1,000,000 times weaker than a mission on the Moon, making it impossible receive any kind of “real time TV” signals.
As a previous blog article (https://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2014/08/05/tracking-the-spacecraft-following-a-comet/) explained, we’re currently able to receive data from Rosetta at roughly 46 kilobits per second.
A 2048 x 2048 pixel OSIRIS NAC image is very roughly equivalent to 64 megabits, so would take roughly 1,400 seconds, almost half an hour, to be transmitted to ground. NAVCAM is “only” 1024 x 1024 pixels, but the same constraints apply. So “live TV” from Rosetta is just not possible.
On top of which, there are 10 other instruments on Rosetta which also need spacecraft power, as well bandwidth to download their data, so the cameras are not always on.
Hope that provides a little more background to the technical constraints involved in taking images with Rosetta and getting them down to the ground.
Are you saying that you don’t even use lossless compression? JPEG lossless (or JPEG-LS or even zip!) should easily manage 2-3:1 on these images, so that should cut the download time to about 10-15 minutes!
Max Planck Institut Sonnenforschung Germany is the PI / OSIRIS Experiment. From US sources I learned that the OSIRIS PI prior to Mister Sierks withheld the OSIRIS pictures of the Rosetta Mars flyby 2007 for more than FIVE YEARS.
Based on the facts(above) : Are we to expect this as the valid MPS/MPG information policy for the 67P/CG mission.
While ESA states on one of their Blogs:
This blog is operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) as an unofficial and in-depth source of information for anyone interested in the Rosetta mission.
It is updated by editors from the ESA Space Science and ESA Human Spaceflight & Operations communications teams with input from Rosetta scientists and engineers.
The team will certainly do their best to get you the latest information on the wake up of Rosetta on 20 January 2014, and throughout the entire mission as the spacecraft reaches, orbits and deploys a lander onto comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
https://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/about-this-blog/
how about boulders flying in the near distance of rosetta ?
Are they detected and mapped?
Seems to me this comet is an collection of frosen together
boulders of all kinds there print leaving when dewing off the comet
kees
That crater
in the front of the neck
of ET/Duck
is amazing.
And considering its density
and supposed lack of compactness
then ET/Duck may indeed
will have her neck broken by the su
Some kind of
extremely “puffy” snow?
Here is my first model
of the “fluffy” layers:
On original attachment
some kind of snowy individual crystals.
The ages turning it to
something like polystyrene foam.
The sun spectra heating
the first surface meters.
The porus growing bigger
(and hexagonal) toward the surface.
This model could explain
the very low reflectivity.
This model
would make a sun orbiting comet
into a dust catcher at aphelion
and a dust thrower at perihelion.