First release of Rosetta comet phase data from four orbiter instruments

ESA’s Rosetta downlink and archive teams are very happy to announce the release today of the first wave of Rosetta instrument data from the “comet pre-landing phase” via the Planetary Science Archive. Data from four instruments are included in this release: COSIMA, OSIRIS, ROSINA, and RPC-MAG. After Rosetta woke up from 31 months hibernation in January 2014, its scientific instruments were turned back on and checked out before being used to study Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko during the approach, rendezvous, and escort phases. As agreed between ESA and the funding bodies responsible for Rosetta’s instruments, their data are initially made available to the corresponding scientific teams for first analysis, with a significant number of Rosetta papers published based on these data, as described in previous blog posts. After a nominal period of 6 months, the scientific data themselves are to be delivered to ESA to be placed in the public domain via the Planetary Science Archive (PSA) for use by all scientists and the wider public. In practice, it was agreed to deliver data to ESA for release in blocks, and the first of those blocks was defined as the ‘pre-landing phase’, i.e. covering the period from January 2014 to just after Philae’s landing on the comet in mid-November 2014. This led to a date of 19 May for the instrument teams to deliver the data from that phase to ESA, following which, a very significant effort had to be made by the ESA team to process the datasets of the many instruments involved and prepare them for release. What did this processing entail? Firstly, the data and the associated metadata had to be checked for completeness and for compliance with standard formats to ensure that they can be downloaded and analysed by other scientists in a transparent manner. This involved interactions […]

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