Comet caught breaking wind:
Looking at Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko at exactly the right moment, Rosetta’s OSIRIS wide-angle camera captures the moment a jet bursts into action. The first image was captured at 06:13 GMT on 12 March, the second two minutes later.
Latest image, 1st May:
So Rosetta started back up?
sibeen said:
So Rosetta started back up?
The Rosetta orbiter has been going fine all along. It was the lander, Philae, that shut down due to lack of power and hasn’t yet powered up again.
Bubblecar said:
sibeen said:
So Rosetta started back up?
The Rosetta orbiter has been going fine all along. It was the lander, Philae, that shut down due to lack of power and hasn’t yet powered up again.
Ta.
Weird that it was the bit at the bottom in the dark that started outgassing.
Much like me. At night. In bed.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-31/philae-lander-photo-shows-there-is-more-to-comets-than-soft-dust/6662378
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Comet lander Philae may be uncommunicative at the moment, but the pictures and measurements it took after it touched down on a comet have shown scientists the comet is covered with coarse material, rather than dust, and is harder than expected.
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The surface of the comet, which the lander tried to drill into, also proved to be much harder than expected.
Under a few centimetres of dust, the lander’s hammer encountered solid ice.
“This ice is similar to firn on Earth, which is old, solid snow that evaporates and re-freezes,” DLR planetary researcher Tilman Spohn said.
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For some reason the ESA is releasing a bunch of images taken by Philae in November.
I was given to understand that Philae was only intermittently responsive but perhaps they are getting some info out of it.
“This image was taken by Philae’s ROsetta Lander Imaging System, ROLIS 9 m above the Agilkia landing site on the small lobe of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The image was acquired at 15:33:58 GMT on 12 November 2014. The image measures 9.7 m across and the image scale is 0.95 cm/pixel. Part of Philae’s landing gear can be seen in the top corners.
This detailed image reveals the granular texture of the comet’s surface down to the cm scale, with fragments of material of diverse shapes and random orientations seen in clusters or alone. The regolith in this region is thought to extend to a depth of 2 m in places, but seems to be free from very fine-grained dust deposits at the resolution of the images.”
I am sure that article had a 3D picture on it earlier, here it is:
A five-metre boulder on Churyumov-Gerasimenko shown in 3D
Though I can’t verifiy at this time if it is indeed a proper 3D picture…
Looking through 3D specs, I can verify that it is indeed a 3D image.
furious said:
- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-31/philae-lander-photo-shows-there-is-more-to-comets-than-soft-dust/6662378
I am sure that article had a 3D picture on it earlier, here it is:
A five-metre boulder on Churyumov-Gerasimenko shown in 3D
Though I can’t verifiy at this time if it is indeed a proper 3D picture…
http://www.space.com/30106-rosetta-comet-lander-philae-comeback.html
Excerpts:
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The Philae lander has been incommunicado on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for three weeks as the icy object has been speeding toward its closest approach to the sun, which will occur Aug. 13. The lander team would love to get Philae up and running again soon so that they can get an up-close look at how this “perihelion passage” affects 67P.
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“When you see what’s happening on the surface of that comet — jets going off, and God knows what else — it wouldn’t take a lot of that going off close to the lander to move it around a bit,” said Ian Wright of The Open University in the United Kingdom, principal investigator of Philae’s Ptolemy instrument, which measures stable isotope ratios of molecules on 67P.
One of Philae’s two transmitters also may not be working properly, European Space Agency officials said. The 220-lb. (100 kilograms) spacecraft is programmed to switch back and forth between these two transmitters; the team is now trying to get Philae to use the functional one exclusively.
“Philae is obviously still functional, because it sends us data, even if it does so at irregular intervals and at surprising times,” Philae project manager Stephan Ulamec, of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), said in a statement last week. “Several times, we were afraid that the lander would remain off — but it has repeatedly taught us otherwise.”
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