After a decade-long journey and four gravity-assist flybys, the Rosetta space probe has finally reached its destination: the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Congratulations to the team!
The comet has shown variable activity as it is approaching the Sun in its elliptical, 6.5-year orbit. For the time being, watch for outstanding images of the comet's core, early scientific results, and the deploy of the Philae lander, currently expected for 11 November.
More information at the Rosetta blog.
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As the Rosetta lander approaches its target comet for a landing in November there are a series of pictures available, and these images have been postprocessed to highlight jets from the comet.
The Rosetta Space Probe is a European Space Agency mission to land a probe on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The pictures are taken from Rosetta's Navigation Camera (NAVCAM) at a distance of 28.6 kilometers as it closes in on the comet ahead of the scheduled descent of the Philae lander.
This particular image is an example of the ESA releasing detailed mosaic images for amateurs to process, which started a few weeks ago, and continues to provide some stunning NAVCAM images.
The raw images were released on the ESA blog and there's a summary of the mission objectives available.
Rosetta has been covered previously on Soylent at arrival and mapping of 67P.
A quick note to mention that the ESA have announced that:
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission will deploy its lander, Philae, to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014.
There is a Press Release with more details available. For additional background on the Rosetta probe, there have been Soylent stories on the Probe's wakeup from hibernation, arrival at 67P, mapping the comet and camera images.
For more information see the ESA Rosetta Page.
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday August 07 2014, @07:05AM
I, for one, welcome our new Comet overlords! Once we land our probe, and have our spacecraft escort this comet around the sun, all our questions will be answered, and science will be able to cease, and stop bringing up all those embarrassing questions about the age of the universe and the reality of global warming and the fact that American voters seem to be getting more stupid in each election since Nixon (When the lizard people took control of the elites of all nations: for the truth, see Weird Al Yankovic, the Aluminum foil video, not the first world problems or the word crimes, OK?) No, seriously, the tech in this science is amazing, kudos to all involved.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KritonK on Thursday August 07 2014, @09:33AM
The comet has an uncanny resemblance to one of the asteroids [blogspot.com] visited by Scrooge McDucks in the story Island in the Sky [inducks.org] by Carl Barks [inducks.org], which was drawn in 1959. It's not duck-shaped, as mentioned in the article, but duck-visited!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 07 2014, @05:00PM
This is so cool. Go Europe! And to think I just read "Lucifer's Hammer" HA! It's amazing this can be accomplished.
(Score: 3, Funny) by TK on Thursday August 07 2014, @05:24PM
I really hope they find some rare earth metals. Maybe we can get some VC funding for the next mission.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Thursday August 07 2014, @10:17PM
This is great news, and I'm glad it's posted here. This is more of the kind of stuff I want to see on Soylentnews, but it seems to suffer from Parkinson's law of triviality [wikipedia.org] in that the comment count is very low, despite it being fantastic, exciting news. (Seriously, who doesn't think this is awesome?)
Is there something we could do to make these types of articles the life of the party instead of handing that title over to articles such as "The color orange deemed inappropriate for young children"?
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday August 08 2014, @06:03AM
At least it is not full of inane comments. Too many times at the other site I click on something interesting and give up due to stupid jokes being repeated over and over or people who haven't thought coming up with ignorant comments on how the study is flawed or worse.