Science Update – 11 November: Three months at the Comet

During this morning's media briefing at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, there was also an overview of the scientific activities conducted at Comet 67P/C-G so far, presented by Matt Taylor, ESA Rosetta project scientist. Regular readers of this blog are surely familiar with the progress achieved by Rosetta in the past few months, but for those who are relatively new to the mission, we will summarise Matt Taylor's talk and present the highlights from the science operations so far. Rosetta started scientific operations on 7 May 2014, while still at a distance of almost two million km from the comet. At the time, the comet covered less than one pixel on the sensors of the cameras on Rosetta, but as the spacecraft approached its target, scientists started to realise that the shape of the comet was quite different than what had been assumed on the basis of observations from telescopes on the ground and orbiting around Earth. We are now all well familiar with Comet 67P/C-G's curious shape with a smaller and larger lobe - which scientists now almost customarily call the 'head' and 'body', connected by the 'neck'. Rosetta closed in on its target on 6 August, at a distance of about 100 km, and has been conducting a series of manoeuvres ever since, getting down to distances of less than 10 km from the comet's centre. Over the past three months, scientists from the OSIRIS team have been studying the comet and its surface in great detail to enable the selection of a landing site for Philae and the landing itself. Meanwhile, other instruments on Rosetta have been studying the comet under different 'angles', from the global properties of the coma to the very local properties of dust grains. Using VIRTIS observations in infrared, […]



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