"Yesterday, 18 October at 18:06 CEST, the thrusters of ESA’s comet chaser, Rosetta, were fired in a planned, 42-second trajectory correction manoeuvre designed to 'fine tune' the spacecraft's approach to Earth. Rosetta is now approaching Earth for its second planetary swing-by of 2007."

From here.

Maybe it is time to start a new thread...
Get out of the way, Rosetta is coming to visit us at full speed!

Cool. I can't wait to NOT get more great images from Rosetta...

Oh yes...I forgot that a complaineorit shower takes place around each Rosetta Swing-by...

Wow! Maybe I missed it - But I hadn't seen the stunning Philae image of Mars+Rosetta before!

I presume you were taking vacations at Saturn by then...

Well, New Zealand - similar but with fewer rings.

I've found that thread now so i can catch up - silly me thinking that that there wouldn't be any images from the flyby yet, being that it's still the same year. #

Isn't Rosetta the first spacecraft to visit Mars and then Earth again?

I believe it is.

I don't know what their release plans are but they do at least plan to take some good photos. I asked Gerhard Schwehm and he said that he'd get back to me with specifics, but broadly speaking, "OSIRIS will observe at approach briefly the night side of the Earth and after perigee will make observations of the Earth and the Moon under the more favourable lighting conditions having the Sun in the back."

--Emily

Does anyone know anything about the geometry of the lunar imaging? I recall that it will be fairly distant, but I am not sure if it is near side or far side.

Closest approach is on 14 november 2007 at about 0:00 GMT (381,000 km)

Approach is on the unlit side of the moon which is the side that faces earth, after the closest approach we're looking at the trailing hemisphere.

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Unlike Rosetta's I guess your pictures were... All... Black...

Here goes!

1) Science plans for Rosetta’s Earth flyby :
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001216/

2) Yet another illustrations to the article above - groundtrack and simulated views :

Please note that the Minor Planet Center's official designation for Rosetta is asteroid 2007 VN84

2007 VN84

Editorial Notice

Funny! Thanks for pointing that out.

--Emily

This'll be the third time that this has occurred. There was 'J002E3 that turned out to be the S-IVb from Apollo 12 back in '02. Before that the satellite WIND was marked down as a potential Earth impact threat, at least until it used its RCS system to change orbit.

I am not sure, but I don't think that the identification of J002E3 with the Apollo 12 stage was 100 per cent sure.

They did some spectroscopy and identified it as TiO2 - the constituent of the white paint used on the those LV's.

Doug

Good grief...that's hysterical! Seems as if our NEO searches are more than effective, anyhow...

Rosetta Blogging
I hadn't seen this before, so I thought I'd post it. ESA has a blog going for the Rosetta Earth Swing-By 2 (ESB2), at
http://webservices.esa.int/page.php?id=37819

It mentions the coverage at the SpaceEurope and Planetary Society blogs.

ESB2 Info

From the Rosetta Earth Swing-By 2 Master Science Plan-

"The baseline attitude of Rosetta is GSEP (GyroStellar Ephemeris Phase, a S/C guidance mode using gyros and star trackers for attitude control) with the spacecraft +X axis pointing to the Sun with a possible bias.

The closest approach (CA) will take place on November 13 (DOY317). At the moment of closest approach, the altitude of
Rosetta will be 5330 km above the Earth surface, at sub-surface position: 63°46' S, 74°35' W (local time 16:17)."

The primary purpose of the Earth Fly-By is trajectory adjustment and velocity change, not science. Science only gets done to the extent that it doesn't interfere with anything else.

The attitude that the spacecraft can be in depends on upon allowed exposures of certain faces to the Sun, limited to certain amounts of time. The allowed attitudes effect what the instruments can see. And the instruments are optimized for slowly revolving around a comet at 4 AU, not the brightly lit crescent of a planet during a rapid fly-by. The science value of any observations are therefore not great, but it does provide an indirect science value by allowing instrument calibrations. It might also generate a few really cool pictures. This may not be scientific, but it is still cool.

Picked up a copy of this mornings Metro on my way back from London and got quite a shock when I turned the page and saw a big picture of Rosetta with a headline along the lines of 'We Missed Up'. I had a few moments of worry until I realized they had just picked up on this story and there hadn't been some major targeting error or something. Phew!

James

Well, this time Earth's flyby is the most important part of the billiard orbital path
Does anyone has an updated orbital path image please ?

The above image dates from 5 years ago, so I'm searching the new version but even the ESA.int multimedia website only has a low resolution version

I think this is more recent....

Indeed Brian, I just got that trajectory-schedule in my e-mail via Dr Andrea Accomazzo, who promised me to check for the color version

Do you guys the orbit view tool at Rosetta's Science & Technology site? Quite useful...
It's on the left column.

Are they serious?
Rosetta mistaken for a near-miss asteroid !

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/07...id-mistake.html

See post #14 of this thread. Once again, you heard it first on UMSF.com!

Flyby successful!

http://webservices.esa.int/page.php

First images (greyscale nav-cams) are up.

http://esamultimedia.esa.int/multimedia/es..._cam/index.html

James

Images are coming IN!

EDITED: You beat me to it James...

While we are waiting, here is a slightly improved version of the two Graham Land images.

Click to view attachment

Some kind of ice planet...

If you zoom in on that you can just make out some AT-ATs closing in on the Rebel base...

Who would have guessed that 2007 VN84 has cameras and can transmit them? What a cool asteroid!

In case you didn't see it, http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/07...id-mistake.html

I'm pretty sure he's aware of that.

First OSIRIS images are up...

Looks like they forgot to link to full-res images.

I wonder if they took a RGB set of the night lights. Probably not, but it would be very cool to see the actual color of the lights as well as the crescent limb.

I think they learnt the lesson after the Mars flyby - From me wandering around ESOC going "Any Wifi? I want to blog for the enthusiasts!" to this brilliant inside story in near real time. Much credit to the guys in Darmstadt!


Doug

The blog idea is commendable, I was actually surprised when I first learned they were going to do it. I hope they continue this practice in the future as well.

EDIT: Higher resolution OSIRIS image versions are here. Guess what my next wallpaper is...

<Geography nerd mode on>
Very cool images, but the feature they label as Bagdad (sic) is actually Tehran
</Geography nerd mode off>

Oops - have you informed the President?

And it looks like their Windows does not know Hongkong...

Just for fun...

Rosetta beams back Earth photos after flyby.

A composite of the OSIRIS crescent and night lights image has been posted.

http://webservices.esa.int/page.php?id=37994



Click image for full size version.

The Moon and Europe - Rosetta OSIRIS images

I played with the Earth-crescent image to see how much detail is present in it... Here's a before and after some bandpass filtering.

Nice one Ed!

For anyone interested there's a new poem up here, inspired by the fly-past...