Rosetta - Early Orbital Operations at Comet 67P C-G, August 6, 2014 - November 13, 2014 Options

[bobik]

Yes, the landing site "zooms" were eeny weeny crops of OSIRIS data, 540 pixels square out of the 2048-pixel CCD.

What's funny (or even ridiculous) is the apparently deliberate pixellation of the full-frame images.

[Gerald]

My interpretation of the pixelation has been the resizing of an image, which has previously been composed of reduced images, to the 540pixels/km scale.
Large images are simply more difficult to work with. The idea of rescaling may have emerged after the image has been prepared, and the post needed to be released.

[MahFL]

What's funny (or even ridiculous) is the apparently deliberate pixellation of the full-frame images[/url].

Did ESA not already say some info will be withheld due to the scientists rights to the info to make their discoveries. ESA has it's own and different release policy from NASA/JPL.

[4throck]

What's funny (or even ridiculous) is the apparently deliberate pixellation of the full-frame images.

Quite natural if you are making a 300dpi image for a press release, composed of individual lower resolution images.

[climber]

I'm wondering whether they'll set up a live landing show for Philae like for Huygens?Anyone heard about this?

[vikingmars]

I'm wondering whether they'll set up a live landing show for Philae like for Huygens?Anyone heard about this?

Yes : affirmative. I'm working on it as TPS with Societe Astronomique de France and Ciel & Espace magazine for a huge show we are organizing with ESA for France to give a live coverage of the landing to a large audience. It will be very much organized like the live show we set up with ESA for the Huygens landing on Titan in 2005

[nprev]

VM, will there also be a webcast accessible to international viewers?

[vikingmars]

VM, will there also be a webcast accessible to international viewers?

Yes : I think there will be an event in Darmstadt that will be broadcasted on TV.
But I dont't know about similar general audience events like the one we are setting-up in France.

[SteveM]

ESA Challenged us to make a Mosaic from Rosetta's four NAVCAM images. Here's my try using Hugin.



Image ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM/Steve M

[machi]

Here is my version rotated by 180° and resampled to 5 meters per pixel (close to real resolution ~5.2 m/pix).

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[JohnVV]

easy enough using Nip2 and a few tie points


now do to camera rotation each image has about 5 extra pixels at the center corner ( the area that is vignetted )

[jasedm]

Oh that's just astonishing! Great work guys. What an amazing piece of debris this is.

(Hugely speculative, and based on a few images):

It looks like two planetesimals of dense material have come together during the early stages of the solar system to form a contact binary, planetary migration then scattered them to a location where they accreted a few tens of metres of ice across the pair as a coating. A chance gravitational encounter then flung them into an elliptical sunwards orbit, with the ice being progressively sublimed away with each perihelion passage, partially revealing the denser and darker two bodies beneath.

Hey, I can hand-wave with the best of them.......

[MarsInMyLifetime]

Hey, I can hand-wave with the best of them.......

I'll have a try at it as well. The scree that lies on the large body side of the neck appears to fill in some pre-existing but no longer active sublimation pans (craters, if you will, but they are too close and consistent in size to convince me that they were formed that non-randomly). Sides of the large body also appear to be sloughed off at some more recent time in the comet's history. Given the neck appears to be the most active area the moment, my hand wave is that a larger original body became very thin in the middle and the "head" simply rolled back to a more gravitationally stable location against its larger part, where many years of continued wasting from the scar have laid the talus slopes inside the neck. It's all hand-waving until the scientists give us their interpretation, but for me this hypothesis avoids dealing with collision energies for low-strength objects. Back to more plausible fiction now...

[Gerald]

There is scheduled an "ESAHangout: Where will Philae land?" in a little more than an hour (16h CEST, 7 a.m. PDT).

[Y Bar Ranch]

I'll have a try at it as well...Given the neck appears to be the most active area the moment, my hand wave is that a larger original body became very thin in the middle and the "head" simply rolled back to a more gravitationally stable location against its larger part, where many years of continued wasting from the scar have laid the talus slopes inside the neck.

I'll take a shot...I think I'm in this camp. My theory is comet shrinking is an unstable process in that once the object departs from spherical to something more ellipsoidal, there is a trajectory of slighter lower energy to depart from the comet at the midpoint/minor axis and so that's where more erosion occurs. Stuff that doesn't depart accretes on the remaining lobes. If one lobe is bigger than the other, it steals from the smaller.

It would be fun and fascinating to run a simulation of this sort of thing. I imagine someone someplace is already doing it.