The ESA’s archive of images from the Rosetta spacecraft is interesting to browse through, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Someone has gone to the trouble of putting together a little video of some of the images close to the surface of the comet. I’m not sure how much of it is photographic artefact and how much is real, but it’s impressive.
Comet surface conditions captured by the Rosetta probe

https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/picture.php?/172650/category/410

Two types of streaks

• slow vertical fallout, like snow
• fast diagonal streaks, I wonder if these could be cosmic rays from the Sun. Or deflected particles from the jet blast. I don’t know.

Haven’t seen this video before. The dust streaks are real but are are taking place close to the camera, so may have been superimposed on the surface picture in that video, I don’t know.

Here’s a Rosetta dust streak snap and some of the caption:

This image was taken two years ago, on 21 January 2016, when Rosetta was flying 79 km from the comet. At this time Rosetta was moving closer following perihelion in the previous August, when the comet was nearer to the Sun and as such at its most active, meaning that Rosetta had to operate from a greater distance for safety.

As can be seen from the image, the comet environment was still extremely chaotic with dust even five months later. The streaks reveal the dust grains as they passed in front of Rosetta’s camera, captured in the 146 second exposure.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2018/01/Comet_storm

Good analysis.

For reference this 1 second loop is made up of about 20 images taken over a 2 minute period on 1 June 2016 from the Narrow Angle Camera. It would have been very roughly 8km from the surface at that time and the fov is 2.4 degrees so the image here is some 300 metres wide.

You can go to the esa link in the OP and go back and forth between various snaps.

These images were languishing in ESA’s archives until a redditor scoured through looking for good sequences and compiled the video. ESA, like the JSA and CNSA, don’t seem to make the most of their findings.

I’ll say this for NASA: they polish and publicise their goods.

dv said:

These images were languishing in ESA’s archives until a redditor scoured through looking for good sequences and compiled the video. ESA, like the JSA and CNSA, don’t seem to make the most of their findings.

I’ll say this for NASA: they polish and publicise their goods.

Agree.

ESA does too, but not to the same extent.

Gotta look hard for JAXA results, perhaps they publish them in Japanese?

China. No way at all to find out what is happening.

Canada. Starting to do really well, with the science results, but you’d never know it.

India. Who?