The Japanese Hayabusa 2 twitter account reports that the spacecraft has begun descending toward Ryugu in preparation to deploy the MASCOT lander. Nothing on the English twitter as of the time of this post.
https://twitter.com/haya2_jaxa/status/1046965970466746369
And the realtime images are back http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/galleries/onc/nav20181002/
Follow #Hayabusa2 approach to #Ryugu for #MASCOT delivery in realtime!
https://programmi.000webhostapp.com/hayabusa2/simulator/simulator.html
Altitude logs:
http://win98.altervista.org/hayabusa2/simulator/hayabusa2.txt
https://programmi.000webhostapp.com/hayabusa2/simulator/ONC_A-log.txt
Spaceflight Now providing live coverage of MASCOT's landing https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/10/02/mascot-landing-mission-status-center/.
The last three frames show a persistent very bright dot on the surface. Possible MINERVA-II1 rover or protective drum?
Sorry, no - the Minerva area is on the other side of Ryugu. The white spot might be added to the images to indicate the descent target point (I'm only guessing) or it could be a naturally reflective object (there are several of them in earlier images). When somebody posted about the sizes of Minerva hardware in pixels, I think they were really only talking about image resolution, not whether the items would be visible, because they are not near the Masot landing area. For one thing, Mascot is targeted south of the equatorial ridge, Minerva was targeted north of it.
Phil
Identification of some rocks on photos taken by Hayabusa2 on 2018/10/03 at 00h41 and 01h12 UTC with estimated position of Hayabusa2 shadow
Separation confirmed per Spaceflight Now!
Identification of rocks on the picture taken at 1h46 UTC with shadow of Hayabusa 2 as a red cross. The shadow is probably shifted out of the map on the right since the map is missing a vertical band of latitude on 340° and 360°.
My recording of the delivery operations based onhttp://haya2now.jp/en.html (altitude in meters):
Now starts video brief in DLR Youtube channel
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=axqedwOW-jo
First image of MASCOT released, showing the landing site from an altitude of 40m:
image!
https://twitter.com/MASCOT2018/status/1047406828617965568
JAXA just released the picture on its MASCOT lander feed: we even see the shadow of MASCOT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axqedwOW-jo&app=desktop.
There will be two more updates in 2 resp. 4 hours from now.
Mascot is fine after initial issues.
Performing night sequences, all instruments are working.
"short delay - stay tuned"
https://twitter.com/MASCOT2018/status/1047456139024261121
The team seems very confident in the hopping and uprighting mechanism. The found the first landung spot too dark and unstable, so commanded a first hop at the beginning of the first sol, to begin the science sequence at another location.
Next press conference has a delay but should beginn soon.
live again...
They had to make an important decision. Therefore the delay.
Spectrometer needs to be in contact with the surface.
Radiometer will tell about thermal conductivity.
Important for deflection of asteroids: What's the arrangement of grains?
Magnetometer: Extremely sensitive, seeing separation, and operation of instruments. Magnetic field data to be cleaned from those instrument operation fields.
They're going to be tired and will drink a beer this evening. Tomorrow, and until Friday, they'll take a look at the data. A first draft of evaluation will take a few more days of computation. But complete evaluaton will take years.
Also interesting: Magentometer team decided to switch off the instrument to safe power, as the have enough data. Let's hope the second sol goes well. The estimate of 16 h battery time probably does not allow for surviving a third night.
I read that expected battery life is https://twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa/status/1047311778886176768and it's not rechargeable (no solar panels), and delivery occurred https://twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa/status/1047325760011288577
So MASCOT mission should come to its end at around 18:17 GMT, 3 hours from now.
Indeed. There will be another press conference in 25 min, maybe they tell us more about the expected life time of the battery. I think it is targeted to last at least two sols in the worst case. Also in the grphic from JAXA, end of mission (EOM) is during the third night. Let's hope for the best, and that the DLR team as uploaded a energy saving program for the third night, so MASCOT may have the chance to upload the data in the next morning, if it survives.
Otherwise the last hours in the night without contact are wasted.
The technical reason is the mass constraint. With just 10 kg, solar panels and rechargables are just too heavy. Rechargables and do not have the energy density compared to non-rechargable batteries. Also, the location MASCOT finally settles was unknown, so no sun light guaranteed. And as we have seen with Philae, if the additional power from solar is required for the science goal, this just adds to the risk.
I added a scale to the first picture we have from MASCOT, and Buzz Aldrin to better figure out the scale (like Mystery Man of fredk )
The altitude at which this picture was taken in 25 m and not 40 m as it was previously stated.
Very nice, those are some big bolders. And again, shadows in the "right" direction makes it so much easier to grasp for my brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSoEapbchGA
JAXA press conference for MASCOT with english translation.
JAXA announced that live navcam image updates are over for this operation: https://twitter.com/haya2e_jaxa/status/1047724464056782853
Mission finished. If accomplished... who knows?
https://twitter.com/MASCOT2018/status/1047806424334655488
In the press conferences yesterday, it was said, that all data will be downloaded from Hayabusa2 on Friday. Considering, that we got updates nearly every 2 h yesterday from the leading members of the MASCOT team, who were surely occupied otherwise, I think the DLR already did a great job covering the event. Ok, compared to thier performance in this regard on other projects.
Also, JAXA has some nice live coverages, but only with the wide field camera. From all the other instruments, and the MINERVAs, too, the data release is not immediate. We have to remember, which agency does the mission and under what premise. I am not sure about JAXA, but thier main "audience" is Japanese. For Rosetta, ESA was bound by contracts to the very slow release of data that we see now. Maybe not suited for todays culutre, but it was fine at the time the mission was planned. Yes, NASA is very open, but that's how it sees its role in the USA. Concerning the DLR, the culture in Germany is not so much the US view of "tax-payers money, so show the results to the tax-payer", but more state funded research. So the obligation to publicly present the work is far less.
This being said: Where are the images from MASCOT from the surface??
As a comparison - the camera on MASCOT ( MasCam ) is somewhat related to the CIVA cameras on Philae.
4 CIVA images were released to the public after Philae's landing
The full CIVA data was finally released to the ESA PSA in August of this year. That's 13.5 years after the first data was collected by CIVA and 3 years after the end of Philae's mission
Patience is going to be required. Lots of it.
We have been thoroughly spoiled by MER, MSL, Cassini and New Horizons. It is quite apparent that other agencies do not consider that kind of image release policy to be the new normal.
"Inside Information" from a participant of the IAC: There is going to be a press conference at the IAC tomorrow (Friday) at 6:30 UTC, so in about nine hours. But I haven't seen any announcements, tweets so far.
It would be better if everyone would follow rule 2.6. Your comments will be deleted. Or does rule 2.6 apply only to NASA missions?
Edit: I see, Lex Sternia!
Don't think so, thanks for the reminder.
IAC live stream can be followed here: http://www.iafastro.org/iac-2018-live-streaming/ Unfortunately, it costs 20 €.
@Baywa: Are on the show and can tell us what will be presented?
@Baywa: Are on the show and can tell us what will be presented?
[/quote]
No, I'm not. But Elizabeth Tasker @girlandkat is tweeting. Have to hurry, breakfast!
DLR's site now has some images, click the side arrows to see all three images:
https://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-30138/#/gallery/32253
Some previews on twitter by @davide_coco91 https://twitter.com/davide_coco91
Video of MASCOT leaving Hayabusa and picture of surface at hopping location number 2.
Keep an eye on Twitter, hashtag #IAC2018
Here's a surface photo from MASCOT!
a new picture from MASCOT - just above the surface of Ryugu
These two pictures are from 10 - 20 (25) m above the surface, before the first landing of MASCOT
http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/topics/20181005_MSC_ONC/
http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/topics/20181005e_MSC_ONC/
The small asteroid lander, MASCOT, that was developed in Germany and France, was successfully separated from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft on October 3 and delivered safely to the surface of Ryugu. After landing, MASCOT acquired scientific data on the asteroid surface, which was transmitted to the MASCOT team via the spacecraft. Scientific analysis of this data is expected to be performed by the MASCOT team from now onwards.
From the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, we attempted to capture the separated MASCOT using the three optical navigation cameras (ONC-T, ONC-W1, ONC-W2). When the image data was received from the spacecraft, we could confirm that MASCOT appears in images photographed with the ONC-W1 and ONC-W2.
That first image is almost unreal, Yoichi, thanks for finding it for us non-Japanese speakers! Wow!
Was able to extract some 3D data from the three images from Hayabusa during MASCOT's decent
https://sketchfab.com/models/c7155bfcac774d65bb4688709b9faca3
Anybody know the proper credit on MASCOT images?
Thanks for the link, that's useful. I'm gonna go ahead and add JAXA and CNES in as well...
Still no information on scale, so it is hard to know what we are looking at. What I am interested in is the first picture, showing the DLR control room. A woman is in the left foreground looking at the projected information on the wall. In the left part of that information is an image of some rocky terrain that does not seem to be among the other pictures they have released.
An attempted red-green stereo image using the frames from MASCOT descent:
Hayabusa2 and MASCOT pictures of the same scene from a different point of view:
There's a much higher quality image of the "hopping location #2" pic from MASCOT on the https://www.dlr.de/dlr/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-30138/#/gallery/32253 website. It's embedded into a margin smaller than the image, which shrinks it a bit, but if you open the https://www.dlr.de/dlr/Portaldata/1/Resources/portal_bilder/2018/2018_4/05Bild_16zu9_MASCOT_LastOrder_xl.jpg itself, you can see a lot more detail.
I see on the MASCOT pictures that one side is not focused..somewhat blurry ...is there any reason for this ?
My guess is, that it is not dejustet but if you land upright you have the nearer objects better in focus than the more far away and you not need a focusable lens assembly which adds some risk to the lander.
Or is it really out of focus ?
Rob
I was wondering about the same thing. Either the image sensor isn't aligned to the lens due to temperature shift or related stress, or, it's deliberately like that so when the spacecraft is on the surface, and righted, both the foreground and background will be in focus like a tilt shift camera where you change the angle of the negative to increase depth of field.
I aligned each 3 frames of the MASCOT animation in relation to Ryugu surface:
No new pictures, but some science results in this article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/10/05/mascot-lander-hops-around-asteroid-exceeding-scientists-expectations/
https://www.dlr.de/dlr/presse/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10172/213_read-30235/year-all/#/gallery/32338
Numerous boulders, many rocks, no dust: MASCOT's zigzag course across the asteroid Ryugu
Finally surface images! Nice oblique view of the giant south pole boulder too! The top seems to be the only big smooth part of Ryugu....
And we have a name for the landing site: 'Alice's Wonderland'
It's easy to make dust through micrometeorite impacts, and some at least should be retained. But cementing or consolidating it is much more difficult. More likely it's a sifting effect, where jostling by impacts causes large chunks to rise and small objects to fall into spaces between them. On Itokawa the same thing was seen except that in some low-lying areas the fine materal became concentrated in smooth patches. We don't see that here, maybe because Ryugu is more equidimensional.
This abstract at the 50th LPSC has a new image from MASCOT, taken during local night with the red LED on. The red ellipse is labelled as the radiometer field of view. Is it possible to remove it from the image to try to restore the background image?
https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2019/pdf/1267.pdf
Needs a little cosmetic work around the edges of the ellipse, but here's a quick and dirty version:
"MASCOT confirms what scientists have long suspected
Small fragments of carbon-rich asteroids are too fragile to survive entry into Earth’s atmosphere"
Press release:
https://www.dlr.de/dlr/presse/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10172/213_read-36790/?fbclid=IwAR0sZ__tvS1OfXxk7-ZWodVoeBCPgxJPfrfjPQkwLyKdx9fOby8qyxi5AWo
Original paper:
Low thermal conductivity boulder with high porosity identified on C-type asteroid (162173) Ryugu
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0832-x?fbclid=IwAR0kNmu1FzdbH_fBYOFLcWTGNcX9QrPCUbVRjSUofU1SrPquGwVWtmiCPak
There are some images from MASCOT at the following website, showing the area that we have seen before, but at four different times of day.
https://mascot.cnes.fr/fr/les-premieres-photos-de-ryugu-par-mascot
At first I was having a hard time connecting surface features but then I realised that MASCOT moved a bit between the late morning and noon images. This is confirmed in the Science paper https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6455/817 yesterday (23 August 2019).
Similar in theme to my last post. This animation blinks between the Noon image and the Late Afternoon image, showing differences in illumination angle. It looks like the lander has slid a bit between these two images as well, and I'm pretty confident it is not an artifact of the changes in lighting angle.
Beautiful photos!
https://www.dlr.de/dlr/presse/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10172/213_read-37306/year-all/#/gallery/36381 is also interesting (22 August 2019) with a handful of photos from MASCOT, including this famous picture, which we all waited for. I took out a few of them (Credit: MASCOT / DLR / JAXA).
PS. In the article, informative descriptions are visible under the photos in the Fullscreen option
In the https://www.dlr.de/dlr/presse/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10172/213_read-37306/year-all/#/gallery/36381 there is also an interesting reference to the discussion about dust (or rather its lack) on the surface of Ryugu, which I initiated on this forum a few months ago:
"...Ralf Jaumann and his team were particularly surprised by the lack of dust: "Ryugu's entire surface is littered with boulders, but we have not discovered dust anywhere. It should be present, due to the bombardment of the asteroid by micrometeorites over billions of years, and their weathering effect. However, as the asteroid has very low gravity – only one-sixtieth of that experienced on Earth’s surface – the dust has either disappeared into cavities on the asteroid or has escaped into space. This gives an indication of the complex geophysical processes occurring on the surface of this small asteroid...”
And another quote from https://www.dlr.de/dlr/presse/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10172/213_read-37306/year-all/#/gallery/36381 is particularly interesting for metorite collectors:
"...Until now, the MASCOT scientists believed that Ryugu was similar to two meteorites that fell to Earth in 1969 in Allende, Mexico, and Murchison, Australia. However, those meteorites barely contain bright particles, probably due to the weathering effect of water in the crystal grid of these minerals. The bright inclusions that have now been observed have led the scientists to conclude that Ryugu's cauliflower-like rocks bear greater similarities to meteorites from Tagish Lake. On 18 January 2000, hundreds of small meteorites rained down on Earth following the explosion of a large fireball over Canada, and numerous fragments were found on the ice of the frozen lake.
These are very rare stony meteorites from what is referred to as the CI chondrite class. The C stands for the chemical element carbon, and the I for the similarity with the Ivuna meteorite found in Tanzania. They are among the oldest and most primitive components of the Solar System, remnants of the first solid bodies to be formed in the primordial solar nebula..."
I added the scale bar according to the original description under the color picture
A little play with a changing perspective in this crazy but beautiful world
I just found the https://mascot.cnes.fr/sites/default/files/drupal/201908/image/bpc_mascot_photo1.png
Now the scale is OK
Sorry about that!
And yet only a larger version (b/w) of the night picture of the surface of Ryugu (from https://phys.org/news/2019-08-images-asteroid-probe-clues-planet.html?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Phys.org_TrendMD_1 )
I am not sure if the color night picture of the Ryugu's surface appeared here in such resolution ( from https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/03/20190822_the-near-earth-asteroid-ryugu-a-fragile-cosmic-rubble-pile.html ):
(I'm sorry if I repeat myself, but such pictures do not stop to fascinate me - from an anonymous dot of light to the New World)
Credit: MASCOT/DLR/JAXA
the latest issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics has three papers (in free access!) on MASCOT:
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2019/12/aa36757-19/aa36757-19.html
When looking at pictures of the surface of Ryugu, I always feel hard to estimate the scale: are these rocks or pebbles? How big are these rocks ? Obviously, scalebar helps but I find more helpful to add objects of everyday life to the pictures or people to give the scale.
Here is the result I obtained with Hayabusa 2 and MASCam pictures, adding Harrison Schmitt or a pencil on them.
For pictures with no scalebar, I computed the scaled "Harrison Schmitt" on the basis of MASCam FOV, altitude at which pictures were taken and horizontal distance to the object.
Much appreciated, Neo.
In your second pic, it's good to see Schmitt visiting a boulder reminiscent of the split boulder he visited nearly 50 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moon-apollo17-schmitt_boulder.jpg
(Which, to date me, is one of my very few clear memories of Apollo.)
open access paper (with some nice images!) on MASCOT results:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/abbb97
Apparently a lot of images are now public. Some animations from landru are in this link showing a number of different things.
https://twitter.com/landru79/status/1705304921682108693
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