And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.
NASA’s first completed Orion crew module sits atop its service module at the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early September 2014. The crew and service module will be transferred soon to another facility for fueling. Credit: NASA/Rad Sinyak
This past weekend technicians completed assembly of NASA’s first Orion crew module at the agency’s Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout (O & C) Facility at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, signifying a major milestone in the vehicles transition from fabrication to full scale launch operations.
The black Orion crew module (CM) sits stacked atop the white service module (SM) in the O & C high bay photos, shown above and below.
The black area is comprised of the thermal insulating back shell tiles. The back shell and heat shield protect the capsule from the scorching heat of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere at excruciating temperatures reaching over 4000 degrees Fahrenheit (2200 C) – detailed in my story here.
Technicians and engineers from prime contractor Lockheed Martin subsequently covered the crew module with protective foil. The CM/SM stack was then lifted and moved for the installation of the Orion-to-stage adapter ring that will mate them to the booster rocket.
Lifting and stacking NASA’s first completed Orion crew and service modules at the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early September 2014. Credit: NASA/Rad Sinyak
At the conclusion of the EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and hits the Earth’s atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour).
“That’s about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions,” Scott Wilson, NASA’s Orion Manager of Production Operations at KSC, told me during an interview at KSC.
The next step in Orion’s multi stage journey to the launch pad follows later this week with transport of the CM/SM stack to another KSC facility named the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility (PHFS) for fueling, before moving again for the installation of the launch abort system (LAS) in yet another KSC facility.
Stacking NASA’s first completed Orion crew and service modules at the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early September 2014. Credit: NASA/Rad Sinyak
The Orion EFT-1 test flight is slated to soar to space atop the mammoth, triple barreled United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Dec. 4, 2014 .
The state-of-the-art Orion spacecraft will carry America’s astronauts on voyages venturing farther into deep space than ever before – past the Moon to Asteroids, Mars and Beyond!
NASA’s first completed Orion crew and service modules being moved inside the High Bay at the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in early September 2014. Credit: NASA/Rad Sinyak
NASA is simultaneously developing a monster heavy lift rocket known as the Space Launch System or SLS, that will eventually launch Orion on its deep space missions.
The maiden SLS/Orion launch on the Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) unmanned test flight is now scheduled for no later than November 2018 – read my story here.
SLS will be the world’s most powerful rocket ever built.
The two-orbit, four and a half hour EFT-1 flight will lift the Orion spacecraft and its attached second stage to an orbital altitude of 3,600 miles, about 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) – and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 years.
Orion service module assembly in the Operations and Checkout facility at Kennedy Space Center – now renamed in honor of Neil Armstrong. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
The EFT-1 mission will test the systems critical for EM-1 and future human missions to deep space that follow.
The Orion EFT-1 capsule has come a long way over the past two years of assembly.
The bare bones, welded shell structure of the Orion crew cabin arrived at KSC in Florida from NASA’s Michoud facility in New Orleans in June 2012 and was officially unveiled at a KSC welcoming ceremony on 2 July 2012, attended by this author.
“Everyone is very excited to be working on the Orion. We have a lot of work to do. It’s a marathon not a sprint to build and test the vehicle,” said Jules Schneider, Orion Project manager for Lockheed Martin at KSC, during an exclusive 2012 interview with Universe Today inside the Orion clean room at KSC.
Orion crew capsule, Service Module and 6 ton Launch Abort System (LAS) mock up stack inside the transfer aisle of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Service module at bottom. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Orion, SLS, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, commercial space, Curiosity, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more Earth and planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Orion crew module back shell tiles and panels inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building high bay at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: Ken Kremer – kenkremer.comOrion EFT-1 capsule under construction inside the Structural Assembly Jig at the Operations and Checkout Building (O & C) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC); Jules Schneider, Orion Project Manager for Lockheed Martin and Ken Kremer, Universe Today. Credit: Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com
A map of Saturn's F ring from 2006 shows one of the few bright, extended clumps (indicated by a green box) seen during six years of observation by Cassini. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Nothing stands still. Everything evolves. So why shouldn’t Saturn’s kookie, clumpy F ring put on a new face from time to time?
A recent NASA-funded study compared the F ring’s appearance in six years of observations by the Cassini mission to its appearance during the Saturn flybys of NASA’s Voyager mission, 30 years earlier.
A kink in part of Saturn’s F ring. While the ring is held together by the shepherd moons Prometheus and Pandora, which orbit just inside and outside the ring, embedded moonlets are believed responsible for the kinks and clumps. The rings is several hundred kilometers wide. Credit: NASA
While the F ring has always displayed clumps of icy matter, the study team found that the number of bright clumps has nose-dived since the Voyager space probes saw them routinely during their brief flybys 30 years ago. Cassini spied only two of the features during a six-year period.
Scientists have long suspected that moonlets up to 3 miles (5 km) wide hiding in the F ring are responsible for its uneven texture. Kinks and knots appear and disappear within months compared to the years of observation needed changes in many of the other rings.
Saturn’s F ring is extremely narrow compared to the historic A, B and C rings. It measures just a few hundred kilometers across. Credit: NASA/Cassini
“Saturn’s F ring looks fundamentally different from the time of Voyager to the Cassini era,” said Robert French of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who led the study along with SETI Principal Investigator Mark Showalter. “It makes for an irresistible mystery for us to investigate.”
A 2007 artist impression of small boulder-like chunks of ice that comprise Saturn’s rings. The largest are about 10-12 feet across.They clump together to form elongated, curved aggregates, continually forming and dispersing. Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. of Colorado
Because the moonlets lie close to the ring and cross through it every orbit, the research team hypothesizes that the clumps are created when they crash into and pulverize smaller ring particles during each pass. They suspect that the decline in the number of exceptionally bright kinks and the clumps echoes a decline in the number of moonlets available to do the job.
So what happened between Voyager and Cassini? Blame it on Prometheus. The F ring circles Saturn at a delicate point called the Roche Limit. Any moons orbiting closer than the limit would be torn apart by Saturn’s gravitational force.
The culprit? Prometheus measures 74 miles (119 km) across and orbits the inner edge of Saturn’s F ring. Credit: NASA
“Material at this distance from Saturn can’t decide whether it wants to remain as a ring or coalesce to form a moon,” said French. “Prometheus orbits just inside the F ring, and adds to the pandemonium by stirring up the ring particles, sometimes leading to the creation of moonlets, and sometimes leading to their destruction.”
Every 17 years the orbit of Prometheus aligns with the orbit of the F ring in a way that enhances its gravitational influence. The researchers think the alignment spurs the creation of lots of extra moonlets which then go crashing into the ring, creating bright clumps of material as they smash themselves to bits against other ring material.
Sounds like a terrifying version of carnival bumper cars. In this scenario, the number of moonlets would gradually drop off until another favorable Prometheus alignment.
The Voyagers encounters with Saturn occurred a few years after the 1975 alignment between Prometheus and the F ring, and Cassini was present for the 2009 alignment. Assuming Prometheus has been “working” to build new moons since 2009, we should see the F ring light up once again with bright clumps in the next couple years.
As the Chinese proverb says, “May you live in interesting times,” and while the promise of Comet ISON dazzling observers didn’t exactly pan out as hoped for in early 2014, we now have a bevy of binocular comets set to grace evening skies for northern hemisphere observers. Comet 2012 K1 PanSTARRS has put on a fine show, and comet C/2014 E2 Jacques has emerged from behind the Sun and its close 0.085 AU passage near Venus and has already proven to be a fine target for astro-imagers. And we’ve got another icy visitor to the inner solar system beating tracks northward in the form of Comet C/2013 V5 Oukaimeden, and a grand cometary finale as comet A1 Siding Spring brushes past the planet Mars. That is, IF a spectacular naked eye comet doesn’t come by and steal the show, as happens every decade or so…
Comet E2 Jacques crossing Cassiopeia as seen from the island of Malta. Credit: Leonard Mercer.
Anyhow, here’s a rapid fire run down on what you can expect from three of these binocular comets that continue to grace the twilight skies this Fall.
(Note that mentions of comets “passing near” a given object denote conjunctions of less than an angular degree of arc unless otherwise stated).
C/2014 E2 Jacques:
Discovered by amateur astronomer Cristovao Jacques on March 13th of this year from the SONEAR Observatory in Brazil, Comet E2 Jacques has been dazzling observers as it passed 35 degrees from the north celestial pole and posed near several deep sky wonders as it transited the constellation of Cassiopeia.
Comet E2 Jacques on August 28th as seen from the MVAS dark sky site in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Credit: John Chumack.
Mid-September finds Jacques 55 degrees above the NE horizon at dusk for northern hemisphere viewers in the constellation Cygnus. It then races southward parallel to the galactic equator, keeping in the +7th to +8th magnitude range before dropping down below +10th magnitude in late October. After this current passage through the inner solar system, Comet Jacques will be on a shortened 12,000 year orbit.
-Brightest: Mid-August at +6th magnitude.
-Perihelion: July 2nd, 2014 (0.66 AU).
-Closest to Earth: August 28, 2014 (0.56 AU).
Some key upcoming dates:
Sep 10: Passes the +3.9 magnitude star Eta Cygni.
Sep 14: Passes near the famous optical double star Albireo and crosses into the constellation of Vulpecula.
Sep 16: Passes in front of the +4.4 magnitude star Alpha Vulpeculae.
Sep 20: Crosses the Coathanger asterism.
Sep 21: Crosses into the constellation Sagitta.
Sep 24: Crosses into Aquila.
The celestial path of Comet Jacques from September 12th through November 1st. (All simulations created using Starry Night Education software.
Oct 5: Crosses the galactic plane.
Oct 14: passes near the +7.5 magnitude open cluster NGC 6755.
Oct 15: Drops back below +10th magnitude?
C/2013 V5 Oukaïmeden
Pronounced Ow-KAY-E-Me-dah, (yes, it’s a French name, with a very metal umlaut over the “ï”!) comet C/2013 V5 Oukaïmeden was discovered by the Moroccan Oukaïmeden Sky Survey (MOSS) located in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. After completing a brief dawn appearance in early September, the comet moves into the dusk sky and starts the month of October located 38 degrees east of the Sun at about 14 degrees above the southwestern horizon as seen from latitude 30 degrees north at sunset. Southern hemisphere observers will continue to have splendid dawn views of the comet through mid-September at its expected peak. Comet Oukaïmeden is currently at +8th magnitude “with a bullet” and is expected to top out +6th magnitude in late September shortly before perihelion and perhaps remain a binocular object as it crosses the constellation Libra in October.
An early image of Comet C/2013 V5 Oukaimeden taken in February of this year. Credit: Efrain Morales Rivera.
And its also worth noting that as comet A1 Siding Spring (see below) makes a close physical pass by Mars on October 19th, Comet Oukaïmeden makes a close apparent pass by Saturn as seen from our Earthly vantage point the evening before! To be sure, the dusk apparition of Comet Oukaïmeden will be a tough one, but if you can track down these bright guidepost objects listed below, you’ll have a chance at spying it.
-Brightest: Mid-September.
-Perihelion: September 28th, 2014 (0.63 AU from the Sun).
-Closest to Earth: September 16th, 2014 (0.48 AU).
Some key upcoming dates:
Sep 10 through Oct 4: Threads across the borders of the constellations Hydra, Pyxis, Antlia and Centaurus.
Sep 18: Passes near the +3.5 magnitude star Xi Hydrae.
Sep 19: Passes near the +4.3 magnitude star Beta Hydrae.
Sep 25: Passes 1.5 degrees from the +8th magnitude Southern Pinwheel Galaxy M83.
Oct 1: Passes in front of the +10.2 globular cluster NGC 5694.
The path of Comet Oukaimeden through the month of October: The Sun position is shown for the final date.
Oct 3: Passes into Libra.
Oct 11: Passes near the +8.5 magnitude globular cluster NGC 5897.
Oct 16: Crosses the ecliptic plane northward.
Oct 18: Passes less than two degrees from Saturn.
Oct 25: Passes less than a degree from the 2 day old Moon and the +3.9 magnitude star Gamma Librae.
The projected light curve for Comet Oukaimeden with observational measurements (black dots). Credit: Seiichi Yoshida.
C/2013 A1 Siding Spring
This comet was discovered on January 3rd, 2013 from the Siding Spring observatory in Australia, and soon caught the eye of astronomers when it was discovered that it would make a nominal pass just 139,000 kilometres from Mars on October 19th.
Comet A1 Siding Spring as seen from NEOWISE early this year. Credit: NASA/JPL.
As seen from the Earth, Comet A1 Siding Spring has just broken 10th magnitude and vaults up towards the planet Mars low to the southwest at dusk this Fall for northern hemisphere observers. A1 Siding Spring is expected to top out at +8th magnitude this month before its Mars encounter, and is on a one million year plus orbit.
-Brightest: Early to Mid-September.
-Perihelion: October 25th, 2014.
-Closest to Earth: October 28th, 2014 (1.4 AU).
Some key upcoming dates:
Sep 17: Passes into the constellation Telescopium.
Sep 20: Passes near the +8.5 magnitude globular NGC 6524.
Sep 21: Passes into the constellation Ara.
Sep 22: Passes the +3.6 magnitude star Beta Arae.
Sep 25: Crosses into Scorpius.
Sep 30: Passes the +3 magnitude star Iota Scorpii.
Mars and Comet A1 Siding Springs crossing paths through the month of October.
Oct 3: Passes near the +7.2 magnitude globular NGC 6441.
Oct 5: Passes 2 degrees from Ptolemy’s cluster M7.
Oct 8: Passes in front of the Butterfly cluster M6.
Oct 10: Crosses the galactic plane.
Oct 11: Crosses into Ophiuchus.
Oct 19: Passes just 2’ arc minutes from Mars as seen from Earth.
Oct 22: Passes north of the ecliptic.
Oct 30: Drops back below +10th magnitude?
Key moonless windows for evening comet viewing as reckoned from when the Moon wanes from Full to New are: September 9th to September 24th and October 8th to the 23rd.
Looking for resources to find out just what these comets and others are up to? The COBS Comet Observers database is a great resource for recent observations, as is Seiichi Yoshida’s Weekly Comet page. For history and current info, Gary Kronk’s Cometography is also a great treasure trove to delve into, as are the Yahoo! Comet and Comet Observer mailing lists.
Be sure to check out these fine icy visitors to the inner solar system coming to a sky near you. We fully expect to see more outstanding images of these comets and more filling up the Universe Today Flickr forum!
Imagery from the new ESA timelapse in 4K from the International Space Station.
Holy moly! Take a look at this new 4K timelapse video from ESA created from imagery taken by astronaut Alexander Gerst. Before you watch, however, you might want to change your video viewing setting to as high as they can go.
The imagery was taken at a resolution of 4256 x 2832 pixels at a rate of one every second. ESA said the high resolution allowed their production team to create a 3840 x 2160 pixel movie, also known as Ultra HD or 4K.
Playing these sequences at 25 frames per second, the film runs 25 times faster than it looks for the astronauts in space. They also did some nice effects creating trails from from stars and lights from cities on Earth for that “hyper-space” look. There’s a great sequence starting at about :55 of the Orbital Cygnus capsule being unberthed from the ISS and then it zooms away from the station.
A portion of a panorama based on pictures taken by the Mars Curiosity rover on Sol 739 in September 2014. Credit: Andrew Bodrov/NASA/JPL-Caltech
Hey, it’s Mars in your browser! Panning around this scene that the Mars Curiosity rover captured earlier this month is the next best thing to being on the Red Planet.
Close by the rover’s is the terrain that proved far more challenging for mission planners than anticipated, and further in the distance you can see mountains — including the ultimate destination for this mission, Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons).
The panorama, done by Andrew Bodrov, is based on pictures that Curiosity took during Sol 739 of its mission on Mars, which began in August 2012.
The Curiosity mission recently drew the concern of a NASA Senior Review panel, which said that the mission may be moving too fast to Mount Sharp and sacrificing looking carefully at other sites that could preserve signs of habitability.
The rover recently passed over a drilling target due to the nature of the rocks it was looking at, which were loose, unstable and at risk to the rover if they moved in an unpredictable way.
On either side of the white line in the picture are two models of how dark matter is distributed in a galaxy similar to the Milky Way. At left, non-interacting cold dark matter creates satellite galaxies. At right, dark matter interacting with other particles makes the number of observed satellite galaxies smaller. Credit: Durham University
Funny how small particle interactions can have such a big effect on the neighbors of the Milky Way. For a while, scientists have been puzzled about the dearth of small satellite galaxies surrounding our home galaxy.
They thought that cold dark matter in our galaxy should encourage small galaxies to form, which created a puzzle. Now, a new set of research suggests the dark matter actually interacted with small bits of normal matter (photons and neutrinos) and the dark matter scattered away, reducing the amount of material available for building galaxies.
“We don’t know how strong these interactions should be, so this is where our simulations come in,” stated Celine Boehm, a particle physicist at Durham University who led the research. “By tuning the strength of the scattering of particles, we change the number of small galaxies, which lets us learn more about the physics of dark matter and how it might interact with other particles in the Universe.”
Artist’s conception of the Milky Way galaxy based on the latest survey data from ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory. A prominent bar of older, yellower stars lies at galaxy center surrounded by a series of spiral arms. The galaxy spans some 100,000 light years. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech, ESO, J. Hurt
Dark matter is a poorly understood part of the Universe, which is frustrating for scientists because it (along with dark energy) is believed to make up the majority of our Cosmos. There are several postulated types of it, but the main thing to understand is dark matter is hard to detect (except, in certain cases, through its interactions with gravity.)
This isn’t the only explanation for why the galaxies are missing, the scientists caution. Perhaps the universe’s first stars were so hot that they affected the gas that other stars formed from, for example.
Reprocessed Galileo image of Europa's frozen surface by Ted Stryk (NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk)
Mysteries abound on icy Europa, that cold moon of Jupiter. Even years after the Galileo spacecraft finished its mission in the Jovian system, scientists are still trying to figure out the nature of the cracks on Europa’s surface. In an exciting find, one new paper suggests that at least part of the terrain could be due to plate tectonics.
If proven, this would be the first time that plate tectonics have been strongly suggested as a process working beyond Earth. On our home planet, scientists believe that this process, which happens as plates of Earth’s crust move, is responsible for creating mountains and volcanoes and earthquakes.
So why do they think this process is happening on Europa? The short answer is, weird terrain. For example, Scientists have seen evidence of what is called extension, which happens when the surface expands and then stuff from the layers below fills in the gap. But there were pieces of that understanding missing until now, the team says.
“We have been puzzled for years as to how all this new terrain could be formed, but we couldn’t figure out how it was accommodated,” stated Louise Prockter, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory who co-authored the study. “We finally think we’ve found the answer.”
An illustration of how subducting tectonic plates might work on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. This would bring the moon’s estimated 10-20 mile (20-30 kilometer) ice shell into the warmer insides of the moon. Credit: Noah Kroese, I.NK
Despite being pretty confident about the extension, scientists were unable to account for how all the new material arrived.
What the team did was try to model how Europa’s surface looked before how all the cracks appeared, and discovered that 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) couldn’t be accounted for in the high northern latitudes.
Looking more closely, they found ice volcanoes that they believe was on a surface plate, and missing mountains in what is thought to be a subduction zone. This suggests that stuff from the surface gets pushed underneath — not crushed into each other.
Rendering showing the location and size of water vapor plumes coming from Europa’s south pole. Credit: NASA/ESA/L. Roth/SWRI/University of Cologne
“Europa may be more Earth-like than we imagined, if it has a global plate tectonic system,” stated Simon Kattenhorn of the University of Idaho, Moscow, who led the study.
“Not only does this discovery make it one of the most geologically interesting bodies in the solar system, it also implies two-way communication between the exterior and interior — a way to move material from the surface into the ocean — a process which has significant implications for Europa’s potential as a habitable world.”
An artist’s rendering of the newly discovered exoplanet OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LBb (far right) orbiting one star (right) of a binary red dwarf star system, from an Earth-type distance of approximately 0.9 Astronomical Units away. Image Credit: Cheongho Han, Chungbuk National University, Republic of Korea
Our solar neighborhood is rich with planetary systems. Within 20 light-years we’ve detected sizzling gas giants and rocky planets orbiting closer to their host star than Mercury orbits the Sun.
Astronomers have now added one more to the list, and this one — a super-Earth dubbed Gliese 15Ab — ranks as one of the closest known exoplanets, circling its host star only 11.7 light-years away.
Gliese 15 is a binary system, with two cool, dim red dwarfs orbiting each other. Although red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the galaxy, they’re so intrinsically faint that not a single one (including the closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri) is visible to the naked eye.
Although Gliese 15A might appear faint from Earth, it is overwhelmingly bright compared to its barely reflective exoplanet. So unfortunately we can’t easily see the exoplanet directly. But it does leave an imprint on its host star. Its small gravitational tug makes Gliese 15A wobble ever so slightly as both orbit a mutual center of mass, known as the barycenter.
The star’s movement is then imprinted on its spectrum. As Gliese 15A moves away from the Earth, its spectral lines stretch to redder wavelengths. But as it moves toward the Earth, its spectral lines compress to shorter wavelengths.
The radial velocities for Gliese 15Ab. Image Credit: Howard et al.
The change is minute. But the Keck 10-meter telescope, with an extremely high-resolution detector, can see such small changes. And from this tiny wobble, Andrew Howard and colleagues calculated that the planet is 5.35 times the mass of Earth and orbits its star in only 11.44 days, making it a hot super-Earth. And remember, it’s only 11.7 light-years away.
A handful of other planet candidates have been found that are closer, but all — including Gliese 15Ab — have yet to be confirmed by other research teams. In the long run, it may turn out that this hot super-Earth is the closest planet to our pale blue dot. Then again, it may not. That’s how science works.
Nonetheless, Gliese 15Ab might prove to be an exciting target for one of the new planet imagers that came online within the past year.
The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and are available online.
Jagged cliffs and prominent boulders are visible in this image taken by OSIRIS on 5 September 2014 from a distance of 62 kilometres from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The left part of the image shows a side view of the comet’s 'body', while the right is the back of its 'head'. One pixel corresponds to 1.1 metres.
Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
Today ESA released the latest high resolution images of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken by the OSIRIS science camera on Sept. 5, and is shown above.
Jagged cliffs and prominent boulders are clearly visible in unprecedented detail on the head and body of Comet 67P displaying a multitude of different terrains in the new image taken from a distance of 62 kilometers.
Meanwhile the Rosetta science team is using the OSIRIS and navcam camera images to create a preliminary map of the comets surface. The map is color coded to divide the comet into several distinct morphological regions.
Several morphologically different regions are indicated in this preliminary map, which is oriented with the comet’s ‘body’ in the foreground and the ‘head’ in the background. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
“With various areas dominated by cliffs, depressions, craters, boulders or even parallel grooves, 67P/C-G displays a multitude of different terrains. Some areas even appear to have been shaped by the comet’s activity,” the Rosetta team said in the release.
The images were also shown at today’s scientific presentations at a special Rosetta research session at the 2014 European Planetary Science Congress being held in Cascais, Portugal.
The scientists are striving to meld all the imagery and data gathered from Rosetta’s 11 instruments in order to elucidate the composition and evolution of the different regions.
The mapping data is also being used to narrow the ‘Top 5’ Philae landing site candidates down to a primary and backup choice.
The final landing site selections will be made at a meeting being held this weekend on 13 and 14 September 2014 between the Rosetta Lander Team and the Rosetta orbiter team at CNES in Toulouse, France.
Four-image photo mosaic comprising images taken by Rosetta’s navigation camera on 2 September 2014 from a distance of 56 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mosaic has been contrast enhanced to bring out details of the coma, especially of jets of dust emanating from the neck region.
Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM/Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer – kenkremer.com
Philae’s history making landing on comet 67P is currently scheduled for around Nov. 11, 2014, and will be entirely automatic. The 100 kg lander is equipped with 10 science instruments.
The three-legged lander will fire two harpoons and use ice screws to anchor itself to the 4 kilometer (2.5 mile) wide comet’s surface. Philae will collect stereo and panoramic images and also drill 23 centimeters into and sample its incredibly varied surface.
Four-image photo mosaic comprising images taken by Rosetta’s navigation camera on 31 August 2014 from a distance of 61 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mosaic has been rotated and contrast enhanced to bring out details. The comet nucleus is about 4 km across. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
The comet nucleus is about 4 km (2.5 mi) across.
The team is in a race against time to select a suitable landing zone soon since the comet warms up and the surface becomes ever more active as it swings in closer to the sun and makes the landing ever more hazardous.
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing Rosetta, Earth and Planetary science and human spaceflight news.
Five candidate sites were identified on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for Rosetta’s Philae lander. The approximate locations of the five regions are marked on these OSIRIS narrow-angle camera images taken on 16 August 2014 from a distance of about 100 km. Enlarged insets below highlight 5 landing zones. Credits: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo/Ken Kremer
