Rosetta spacecraft is impacting the comet today!

Remarkable achievement. AMAZING photos, too! Thanks for bringing this back to my attention; I had completely forgotten all about it.

Will they at any point bring it back online? Or was the goal just the collision and approach imaging?

Peace.

www.periscope.tv...

Now we just need to get some people out there!!

It was like saying a good friend goodbye. A pity they commanded it to power down upon landing, it would have been interesting to see if it survived the landing, however unlikely. I fully understand the reason for it, but still....

Guess it finally proved that comets are not plasma balls after all, like the EU guys said. I can fondly remember some very heated debates here on ATS about the electric nature of comets, and the prediction that Rosetta was going to be destroyed by lightning as it came close to the comet.

a landing!!!!from a crash course...win!

originally posted by: DAVID64
Now we just need to get some people out there!!

You go on ahead. I like simple things like air and water and trees and stuff.

Goodbye Rosetta, sleep well.



As a bonus, you get some of Rosetta's last images that haven't been published yet, posted by Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society:






The very, very last of Rosetta's images are blurry

How do we know it was not the comet which impacted the spacecraft?

One of the descent images enhanced by Ted Stryk:





Imagine you stood there yourself, looking up at those huge cliffs.

~~~

It's a bit surreal to realise that Rosetta isn't orbiting this comet anymore, and that it isn't going to get any more new images.

Here's one of my favourite photos from the mission:

I wish they had some kind of scale showing so I could tell the size of the features we're seeing. Are those rocks centimeters or tens of meters wide?

originally posted by: Saint Exupery
I wish they had some kind of scale showing so I could tell the size of the features we're seeing. Are those rocks centimeters or tens of meters wide?

Images posted at ESA's Rosetta blog usually specify the scale involved.

That "huge cliffs" image scale is about 30 cm/pixel and the image measures about 614 m across.

With a bit of work, one could make composite images that help visualise the scale:

a reply to: wildespace

That is bitchin!
Thanks for your effort.

Big ol' snowballs!

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: wildespace

That is bitchin!
Thanks for your effort.

Big ol' snowballs!

You're welcome, although my effort boils down to mostly just finding images and uploading them here.

~~~

I've just discovered the OSIRIS Image of the Day archive, with lots of great images to peruse.

Here's a composite image I just made:

a reply to: wildespace

Great stuff, Wildspace. Thanks!

Some images are just mind-boggling, in terms of gavity and direction. For example, this shot, which provides an oblique view and a top-down view of the surface in the same frame:



Makes it look like you could walk over the "edge" and stand at 90 degrees angle to where you've been before.

And look at that gigantic boulder sitting there (top right part of the image). It's gotta be about 30 meters wide.