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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

ESA releases complete Rosetta archive, including a final surprise [astronomynow.com]

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 [creativecommons.org] 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.

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