#livingwithacomet

Alice’s last spectra
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/10/03/alices-last-spectra

We were happy to spot this tweet from #Rosetta's Alice instrument Principal Investigator Alan Stern over the weekend, showing the final spectrograph image obtained by the instrument moments before #rosetta impacted on to the surface of the comet on Friday: Heading bk from Germany & the end of Rosetta’s flight mission. Our Alice UV spectrograph’s final image: made minutes b4 touchdown. #Proud pic.twitter.com/dLtvhtrKRl — AlanStern (@AlanStern) October 1, 2016 We exchanged a brief email with Alan yesterday, who confirmed: "The spectrum shows the reflectance of the surface at close range with ~3m resolution — which is unprecedented for ultraviolet studies of comets." Congratulations Alice! We’re looking forward to hearing more from the various instrument teams in due course as to what (...)

#Comet_67P #Instruments #Science ##CometLanding ##LivingWithAComet #science

#LivingWithAComet blog post series – summary
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/29/livingwithacomet-blog-post-series-summary

Find out from #Rosetta's instrument teams what it was really like “living with a comet” for two years. The blog posts include anecdotes from the teams including challenges overcome and ’scares’ the #instruments gave them, as well as the scientific highlights and some impressive data collection statistics along the way! 

#Operations #Science #rosetta #science

Living with a comet: an #osiris team perspective
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/29/living-with-a-comet-an-osiris-team-perspective

 OSIRIS, #Rosetta’s Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System, has been our all-seeing eye on #Comet_67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, capturing nearly 68,000 high-resolution #Images of its nucleus and coma from all angles for 924 days. Here the OSIRIS team share some insights beyond the beauty of the images their camera returns. With inputs from Holger Sierks, OSIRIS principal investigator. OSIRIS has always had a big team: there are 97 team members today, and more than 300 people were involved – including industry partners – at the time the camera system was built. The instrument itself comprises two cameras – a wide- and narrow-angle camera, three electronics boxes, eight harnesses, and 22 subsystems, which were provided by nine European research institutes, plus industry, and (...)

#Instruments #Science ##LivingWithAComet #instruments #rosetta #science

Living with a comet: an Alice team perspective
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/28/living-with-a-comet-an-alice-team-perspective

Rosetta’s ‘Alice’ instrument – which is the only #Rosetta instrument that isn’t an acronym, it is simply a name that the instrument’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, likes – was the first in a line of ultraviolet spectrographs that have also flown on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter, New Horizons and JUNO. It has also been with some Alice team members for their entire lives. With inputs from Alan Stern, Joel Parker, Mike A’Hearn, and John Noonan. John Noonan is the youngest Alice team member – he was just 10 when #rosetta launched. “Rosetta really got started in the same year I was born, and being able to work on a mission that is the same age as me has been incredibly humbling,” he says. “Working on Rosetta while attending college showed me exactly what I would be getting myself into by (...)

#Comet_67P #Comets #CometWatch #Instruments #Science ##LivingWithAComet #instruments #science

Living with a comet: a CONSERT team perspective
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/28/living-with-a-comet-a-consert-team-perspective

Rosetta and #Philae were both equipped with the CONSERT radar experiment in order to bounce radio waves between the two to study the internal structure of the comet. Little did we know that this instrument would play a critical role in locating where the missing lander had bounced to after its unexpected landing on 12 November. Instrument Principal Investigator Wlodek Kofman shares how CONSERT’s modest measurements have yielded big results. It is good to remember that CONSERT, in the morning of 13 November 2014, provided the first estimation of where #philae had bounced to the previous day, based on the data collected overnight from 12 to 13 November. After that the #Rosetta project requested to add three additional #Operations of CONSERT in order to perform the triangulation and improve (...)

#Instruments #Science ##LivingWithAComet #rosetta #science

#Rosetta in numbers
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/09/27/rosetta-in-numbers

Some impressive numbers from #rosetta's mission. Click for full res! Summary Rosetta’s mission lasted 12 years 6 months and 28 days, from launch on 2 March 2004 to mission end on 30 September 2016. During that time, the spacecraft travelled some 7.9 billion km, including three gravity assist flybys at Earth and one at Mars, and two asteroid flybys. Travelling from Earth and eventually out towards the orbit of Jupiter, the vast distance between the spacecraft and the Sun, and spacecraft and Earth, has impacted on available solar power and data downlink capabilities respectively, as detailed in the graphic. The majority of remaining figures shown apply to Rosetta’s time at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, between 6 August 2014 and the end of September 2016, although navigation camera images (...)

#Fun_stuff #Operations #Outreach #Science ##LivingWithAComet #ground-based_observations #manoeuvre #science

Celebrating two years at the comet
▻http://blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/08/05/celebrating-two-years-at-the-comet

We’re celebrating #Rosetta’s two year anniversary at #Comet_67P/C-G (tomorrow!) with a new animation visualising the spacecraft’s incredible adventure flying alongside the comet. The animation begins on 31 July 2014, during #rosetta’s final approach to the comet after its ten-year journey through space. The spacecraft arrived at a distance of 100 km on 6 August whereupon it gradually approached the comet and entered initial mapping orbits that were needed to select a #Landing site for #philae. These observations also enabled the first comet #Science of the mission. The manoeuvres in the lead up to, during and after Philae’s deployment on 12 November are seen, before Rosetta settled into longer-term science orbits. In February and March 2015 the spacecraft made several flybys. One of the closest (...)

#Arrival #Operations ##CometLanding ##LivingWithAComet ##perihelion2015 ##WakeUpRosetta #orbit #timeline #trajectory