ESA releases complete Rosetta archive, including a final surprise
The European Space Agency has released a complete archive of imagery and data from the historic Rosetta mission, allowing armchair astronauts to relive the spacecraft's thrilling final descent to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the challenging search for the wayward Philae lander. It even includes a reconstructed final frame that wasn't initially recognized as an image.
The final set of high-resolution images from the OSIRIS camera covers the period between July 2016 and end of mission on 30 September that years, pushing the total number of wide- and narrow-angle images to nearly 100,000 over the mission's 12-year voyage.
[...] "Having all the images finally archived to be shared with the world is a wonderful feeling," Holger Sierks, OSIRIS principal investigator. "We are also pleased to announce that all OSIRIS images are now available under a Creative Commons license."
As an added bonus, Sierks' team discovered three packets of data that were part of a partial image, the last one Rosetta attempted to capture before setting down on the comet's surface and ending science operations. The packets represented about half of a complete image but engineers were able to reconstruct a slightly blurred view showing a metre-wide view of the surface.
There is a link in the story to a 2m54s YouTube video of OSIRIS images taken during Rosetta's final hours.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Appalbarry on Sunday June 24 2018, @12:28AM (1 child)
Official ESA Rosetta image page. [esa.int]
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 24 2018, @01:12AM
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2018/06/Philae_waving [esa.int]
This image with the teetering (or so it appears) boulder and the Philae lander hiding (center left) is pretty dramatic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]