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European Rosetta Space Craft About To Rendezvous With Comet
Taco Cowboy (5327) writes After a long 10-year journey spanning some four (4) billion kilometers, Rosetta, an interplanetary space craft from the ESA (European Space Agency), is on its final approach to comet Comet 67P (or comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko). The last in a series of 10 thruster firings over the past few months has slowed Rosetta to the pace of a person walking, about two miles per hour relative to the speed of its target at a distance of about 60 miles. Photographs have already revealed a surprisingly irregular shape for the 2.5-mile-wide comet, possibly an amalgamation of two icy bodies or a result of uneven weathering during previous flybys. From a distance, the blurry blob initially looked somewhat like a rubber duck. As the details came into the focus, it now more resembles a knob of ginger flying through space. Wednesday marks a big moment for space exploration: After a few thruster rockets fire for a little over six minutes, Rosetta will be in position to make the first-ever rendezvous with that comet nickname 'Rubber Duck.' 'This burn, expected to start at 11 a.m. central European time, will tip Rosetta into the first leg of a series of triangular paths around the comet, according to the Paris-based European Space Agency, or ESA, which oversees the mission. Each leg will be about 100 kilometers (62 miles) long, and it will take Rosetta between three to four days to complete each leg. There will be a live streaming webcast of Rosetta's Aug. 6 orbital arrival starting at 8 a.m. GMT via a transmission from ESA's spacecraft operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany. Also at the BBC.
6.4 billion kilometers (4 Billion miles)
Our live webcast will be at www.esa.int starting at 10:00 CEST / 08:00 UT. Should be some cool new pictures of the comet to see.
(Disclaimer: I'll be one of the speakers :-)
Envious much?
Two miles per hour is much slower than i can get my Kerbal space ships. Of course, in that you are flying by the seat of your pants and another space ship is just a few clicks away. Still, it gives you a bit of an appreciation of what they have achieved with Rosetta.
Why would we need to do that? We already have Apple products for that purpose.
No. I don't even like ice.
The URL is http://www.livestream.com/euro...
I'm actually surprised that the post/summary doesn't include it (except for the incidental embedded version in the one article linked).
I have always wondered why the photographs that come back from space are so grainy/blurry and have poor color reproduction. Why aren't the images clearer? Why don't we get to see movies instead of just crummy looking stills?
There *must* be a reason that they can't make photos that come from space exploration better or include full color videos so that we can see what these things would look like if we were really there.
I can only posit that either the radiation hardening necessary for space exploration somehow precludes the use of large CCD/CMOS sensors, or the bandwidth limitation of sending data from that far out makes anything other than tiny images with low resolution possible, and makes video impossible.
But still I can't help wondering why, if they can spend tens of millions to put these things up there, they can't produce better images for whatever millions are left over for on board equipment.
There are several US-made instruments on board, so this is not a purely Euro operation.
Yeah, let's send 8000 MBit/s 1080p full HD video of a comet nucleus from the space probe.
How much bandwidth this requires and thus how much power generated shall be left as an exercise to the reader.
Reasons: radiation hardening, radiation, low light conditions, several images needed to create a bigger image, distances, everything is moving, power requirements of transmission, etc. etc. etc.
The live broadcast has been fairly interesting so far, they actually allowed a scientist pointing at a water spectrum graph to be broadcast. This is almost like being back in the 70's when they treated the audience as if they had done high school and were actually interested.
I do hope they put some of this up on Youtube
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Here it is ... http://sci.esa.int/where_is_ro...
Roughly 23 light minutes away.
And BMWs and Rolexes and Gucci bags and on and on. No need to single out Apple here.
As an American, it depresses me that this is an ESA mission and that the NASA budget is again being dithered away on yet another politically viable (i.e. all the right contractors and congressional districts involved) reimagining of launch technology that has not changed markedly since the 70s. Just typing that hurt. But, really cool and I'm glad someone's doing this!
I wouldn't even call myself an amateur astronomer since I'm just a curious layman but based on what I recall from various FAQs and articles related to all probes, bandwidth is very limited and still images are of limited value and from a scientific POV video adds absolutely nothing to still images. Engineers and scientists have to balance everything so carefully that they pretty much negotiate about every rotation of each wheel as a trade-off between scientific data and risk exposure to the rover. Thus, "entertainment value" is the very last consideration when payloads are decided. That said, when the day comes that a sample return mission to Mars comes back, I will consider it unforgivable if there aren't a few terabytes of 4k 50 fps video on the return probe. If I can order a wrist watch with 4 GB memory and an HD recording camera from China today, it cannot be too much to ask for that a few grams is reserved for such memory modules.
Is the probe sponsored by the company that makes the language learning software?
Fucking morons.
Wouldn't that be rolices?
I don't like him either.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Wouldn't that be rolices?
Since you have to ask, you can't afford them.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It has come up before when people compare technology to today's standards. This thing was launched 10 years ago, and designed years before that, and even then they are not going to use cutting edge stuff but rather time tested stuff that will not fail, because it won't actually be used for 10+ years. Try designing for that. Sure your iPhone might have a 10MP camera in it, but it only came out recently, and I don't know about you, but mine stopped working after 3 months.
Could you imagine spending the amount of money that they do, waiting 10+ years, and then finding out the camera doesn't work? Bummer.
I said Rosetta, this here's the Rubber Duck, and we ain't gonna pay no toll. So we crashed the gate, doing 98 (m/s), said let them truckers roll, 10-4.
http://youtu.be/0gu2_ALY7oA#t=...
1. Image quality is more to do with optics that sensor resolution. Optics are also much bigger/heavier. At the distances in question you'd want some serious optics juts to get anything, so chances are the mass budget of the spacecraft is limiting the image quality because they're bringing the biggest telephoto lens they can afford but at the ranges in question it's still not enough to make the comet "fill the frame".
2. The ghostly monochrome is probably because the image is predominately in infra red not the visible spectrum. As beyond a certain point the blackbody IR from the comet will out-weigh the reflected visible light from the Sun. Also most digital cameras are more sensitive to IR than the visible spectrum anyway.
3. Limitations on antenna size and power will enforce a bandwidth cap (which is shared with any other telemetry necessary for navigation or other sensors, which requires a trade off between higher resolution images and more images. Depending on how much "worse" the lower quality images are it might be better to do interpolation on more images than trying to get fewer slightly better images.
Looks like the Firefly covered by dust and rock....
That, is just, AWESOME
I think you are a liberal pretending to be a racist conservative.