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Unfortunately Twitter butchers video quality.
I remade both landru79's videos from scratch using original ESA 2048x2048 image sequence (plus I added a bit of motion interpolation):
http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/rosetta/rosetta.webm [50MB]
http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/rosetta/rosetta_stars.mp4 [28MB]
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Edit: in case my server doesn't hold up, here are video mirrors on Streamable:
(seems better quality than Twitter and YouTube)
Dear NASA -
Science is amazing. Don't forget to make it relatable by doing work like this! People love to see great images, so you gotta curate them and highlight the stunning stuff like this!
Rosetta was actually built and launched by ESA, not NASA :)
Still, I couldn't agree more with your comment.
Would love to see these without the frame interpolation (which totally chokes on all the particulate matter).
You're very talented, this is dope. Thanks for taking the time to make this and share it with us!
What is that light on the left?
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
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.
Observable.of(rosetta)
.map(rocket => gravityAssist(rocket,'Earth'))
.map(rocket => gravityAssist(rocket,'Mars'))
.map(rocket => gravityAssist(rocket,'Earth'))
.map(rocket => gravityAssist(rocket,'Earth'))
.do(rocket => land(rocket))
.do(rocket => tweetVideo())
.catch(error => kaput(error))>Now back to my Javascript callback bugs
Check to make sure you are running the right files... Spelling/Capital letter errors... Returning after selecting a case...
Just some horror stories that cost me 8 days...
Moving at 135,000 km/h relative to what? (honest question)
There's also one with the fixed stars held... fixed.
And since massimo is a horrible disgusting freebooter who uploads degraded, double-encoded stuff he downloads from other people, there's also a clearer version of the OP video from the original creator themselves:
Wow! A lot of what I assumed was dust was actually faint stars.
Beautiful.
The HN title is wrong. This was not taken "on the surface", but from a 13-14 km orbit, according to source ESA data (click on a picture to see its data): https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/index.php?/category/410/s...
Each picture is a 12.5-second exposure. Therefore this 25 fps video is sped up 312.5×
I was trying to figure out if the probe was sliding down a hill or if it was the camera panning.
14km and 312.5x speed up makes it quite surreal if not misleading.
Thank you! I couldn’t figure this out, as I thought the probe was shut down on impact. This makes much more sense.
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 other world where all this stuff is happening on it, and yet no one is there to notice it (so what's the point in anything happening there?), and it's just waiting for me (humankind) to come and see it.
Some people might feel insignificant because of that, but not me, quite the opposite, I feel huge, because it's waiting for me (us).
This has to be how people felt about the explorers of old. They must have been seriously famous.
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.
Rosetta did not fail, did it? The mission did include a lander that performed quite a bit short of expectations (it was operational only for a few days), but the Rosetta orbiter was active for a couple of years.
Original here, in better quality: https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168
ESA PR is basically hopeless. It's the polar opposite of NASA. I guess the budget is nonexistent.
Good that there are people that disseminate these things on Twitter etc.
The Rosetta and Philae stuff, Emily Lakdawalla of Planetary Society did a better job of covering it than anyone at ESA, unfortunately.
To be fair, Emily Lakdawalla also did a better job covering the Cassini-Huygens mission than anyone at NASA. Her reporting about the Huygens RUSO/TUSO mishap and the overall mission coverage was top notch.
Yeah, it's bad. But at least their Rosetta stuff was way above their regular standards, with things like [1] and [2]. Of course those were more feelgood public outreach projects than technical reporting for space aficionados. But that's exactly what ESA needs more of, they simply don't have the sort of relationship with general European public that NASA has in the US.
Isn't NASA prohibited from using any of its budget for explicit PR, to avoid anything remotely political?
(Honestly as a news consumer it's not all that bad because it means I can trust any communications coming from NASA proper to be purely mission oriented—focused on science.)
For anyone curious, there's a cute youtube series that the ESA made explaining what is rosetta, philae and what do they do. It's targeted for kids, but I loved it too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trljrwTbr4w&list=PLgx5PMpgon...
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.
That's just mind-blowing. I remember being really young when a comet came by and wondering what it would look like from the surface, and now here's an actual video.
This episode of BBC's The Sky at Night is a superb peek behind the scenes of the Rosetta mission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvGdoya8g4k
Again, what timeframe am I looking at here?
To truly grasp the awesomeness of this video I want to know is it 1 month of composite images or 1 to 1 video? Anyone?
Every frame is 12 seconds, I believe.
What is the scale of this scene? How tall is that wall?
I just finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's 2061 about people landing on Halley's Comet, so this video is a timely illustration of what they might have seen. :)
Confirmed: The stars in the background behind Comet #67P are in Canis Major: the cluster NGC2362 "falls down" past the limb at top-left; sparse cluster NGC2354 & the star 27CMa are also in the field.
Programming challenge: filter out (or otherwise remove) the sky from the video to isolate the comet surface for better analysis.
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)
I believe you are seeing dust.
I don't understand the perspective here. Is this the orbiter looking "across" the comet, but "zoomed in" so it looks like we are standing on it?
The orbiter was 13km above the comet at the time these pics were taken.
Would love to see this with the stars and high energy particle hits edited out.
Anyone have an alternate link? Twitter is blocked where I am.
On Imgur: https://i.imgur.com/GoMXGWm.gifv
This is bananas.
You made my day, awesome footage.
This video is apparently not from the surface, but from several kilometers away:
>> Ross James Walker @rossjwalker96: Is rosetta moving on the surface here? Can't work out how the perspective seems to move to the right?
> Massimo @Rainmaker1973: It's moving, but these images were captured from 13 kilometres away. Rosetta flew even closer during its mission before landing on the surface in September 2016
damn! those are some gnarly slopes! any word on when spaceX will start doing ski-trips? ;)