The Rosetta downlink and archive teams at ESAC are pleased to announce that the next set of NAVCAM image data are now available in ESA’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA) and via the new NAVCAM Image Browser tool.
This sequence of 76 images was prepared using images acquired on 30 July and 1 August. The apparent darkening of the nucleus during the
sequence is caused by the dependence of the reflectance factor on phase angle, which evolves from 3.4 to 8.5 degrees, when the distance from Rosetta to the comet reduced from 1332 km to 853 km.
Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
The Image Browser was launched earlier this month with NAVCAM image data from the first half of 2014. The latest set of 214 images, taken between 2 July and 1 August, cover the period when Rosetta moved from 42 980 km to 848 km from the comet, and the shape of 67P/C-G was finally revealed. During this phase, 4-5 images were taken per day for navigation, with one image taken every 30 minutes from 30 July to 1 August.
As an added bonus, the Image Browser has now also been updated with images from the cruise phase of the mission (the underpinning data was already accessible via the PSA). That is, the NAVCAM images taken during the swing-bys of Earth and Mars, and asteroids Steins and Lutetia are now also available via the Image Browser (although note that the cruise phase datasets for Steins and Lutetia only contain navigation images from a far distance, so the asteroids are not resolved).
The next NAVCAM data release is expected on 30 April.
For background information about the Image Browser, see our introductory blog post here or go directly to the Browser here.
Discussion: 5 comments
There is a hint of sphericity to the neck’s carving, at this particular .GIF image. Also pointing clearly at South Pole ‘structures’.
https://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/files/2015/03/ROSETTA_NAVCAM_20140730T2000_20140801T0930_movie_v20150223.gif
In a sense we get to re-live the approach phase through these images. The nice gif you posted represents the most interesting ones of the newly released comet phase pictures. It’s also easier, at least when you only want to look at a few images, to use the archive image browser rather than the PSA.
One minor detail I’m curious about is that some of the calibration images, such as https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/picture.php?/5466 as well as a few others, are at a resolution of 1023×1023 and not 1024×1024. I don’t understand the reasoning behind that at all.
Would it be possible to add a json interface to the image browser so that others could develop new ways of consuming the image data?
ie add a “?json” to the end of the url that would return the data as Json formatted
eg
https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/picture.php?/4736/category/51&json
a json API for example is at
https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/image/image_manifest.json
Aha, there is an API provided by Piwigo (upon which this catalog is based) which can output json
see https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/tools/ws.htm for an interactive API explorer!