We followed the adventures of the Rosetta spacecraft as it approached and sent the Philae Lander onto the surface of comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency (ESA) is just now releasing substantial data gathered during the expedition. And it's awesome. Twitter user landru79 combined that data into a gif, which Phil Plait converted to a video.
Plait explains what we are seeing.
The landscape itself is the comet. Comets are lumps of ice — things like frozen water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia — and rock, mostly in the form of gravel and dust. Some orbit the Sun on long ellipses, and when they get close in the ice turns into a gas, releasing ice flakes and the gravelly bits. This surrounds the solid nucleus with a gaseous/dusty coma, and that can then blow away from the comet due to the solar wind and pressure of sunlight to form the tail.
67P is a double-lobed comet, looking more like a rubber ducky than anything else. It's very roughly 4 or 5 km across, and takes about 6.4 years to circle the Sun once. Rosetta was about 13 kilometers from the comet as it took these images, slowly moving around it so that our vantage point in the video changes slightly. Comets are very dark, and it was three times farther from the Sun than Earth is when these images were taken, so the lighting is fainter. Also, these were on the "dark side" of the comet, so the illumination you see is from reflected sunlight by the coma. The video represents about a half hour of real time.
Phil has plenty more to tell us about the data from 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko at Bad Astronomy.
(Image redit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)
Comments (2)
And anybody who introduces themselves by relating what books and comics they've read recently seems pretty danged good to me (actually I'm currently trying to get into Chia Mellville's Perdito Street Station myself, I get the feeling I -will- enjoy it if I manage to get through the first chapter ...) anyway, hello! =)
I unlocked a short video. The bionic woman turns around while in a dark alley to see a thug come out. She begins to assess him with her bionic eye with a split screen effect (left side is regular/right side is bionic assessment). Her assessment show a knife in his right hand. He walks toward her and asks if she is looking for something. He slashes at her and she grabs his hand, knocks the knife up into the air, knocks thug onto his back, catches knife out of air, and puts it to thug's neck. This is done quickly in a fluid motion but not so fast as to not catch it.
I tried to get a better score to see if it would unlock more or better stuff, but I couldn't.
I went back and did it again. After getting 82%, I unlocked another short video. One guy turns to another and asks how long til she's combat ready. The other replies that she's a civilian. That was it two whole lines.
Don't spoil it for the next no-prize winner.
Do I get a cookie?
I messed up the hearing thing, but I got 75% straight for the first 3 tests...