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A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

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Re: A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

#11
post #7

Given how quickly the stars are moving, is the comet rotating quickly, or is it a timelapse?

The comet was spinning with a period of about 12.4 hours, according to http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/58368-hu-keller-et-al-2016/ (so yeah, timelapse)

Re: A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

#12
To put things in perspective, the comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is about 4km in diameter, moving at 135,000kms per hour. Rosetta's rendezvousing with the comet required travelling a cumulative distance of over 6.4 billion kms. Gravity assists were needed from four planetary flybys – one of Mars (2007) and three of Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009) – a long circuitous trip that took ten years to complete.

Now back to my Javascript callback bugs

Re: A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

#13
This twitter user Massimo/Rainmaker1973 is constantly posting interesting content he finds on the internet, 7 days a week. Sometimes I wonder if it is actually not a single person but a small team of enthusiasts, scientists, experts and internet addicts.

Re: A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

#14
post #4

It's really a shame Rosetta (edit: Philae not Rosetta) failed, because this video is unbelievable. I am seeing another world, which no one else has ever seen before. Anyone know if there are plans to try again? There's just something about video of another world, which simply collecting data doesn't approach, even if the data is more scientifically valuable. I can't quite put it into words, it's like there's this oth…

Rosetta did not fail. Rosetta achieved all its goals, and then some. Philae's landing failed, but they actually got quite a fair amount of data from it, too.

This year, OSIRIS-REx is going to visit asteroid Bennu[0], and the exciting thing about it is that it's a sample return mission, i.e. the probe is going to head back & re-enter. RDV is in June/July, and touch down in December IIRC.

Probes visiting "other worlds" is kind of difficult, but it has been done, even in extreme cases, such as Venera (Venus) and Huygens (Titan) — if you don't know the pictures from these, you should really look them up.

[0] https://www.asteroidmission.org/

Re: A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet

#16
post #12

To put things in perspective, the comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is about 4km in diameter, moving at 135,000kms per hour. Rosetta's rendezvousing with the comet required travelling a cumulative distance of over 6.4 billion kms. Gravity assists were needed from four planetary flybys – one of Mars (2007) and three of Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009) – a long circuitous trip that took ten years to complete. Now back to my…

To be fair, people have been studying and predicting celestial movements for millennia, and boiled it down to unbelievably precise mechanical formulae. JS is poorly understood in comparison.

I say this to hope you feel better at work. I've been pressed into frontend web work and it's fractal complexity.

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