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A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet
- eterps 8y agoYou made my day, awesome footage.
- DaveSapien 8y agoThis is bananas.
- ars 8y agoIt'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.
- krastanov 8y agoRosetta 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.
- adimitrov 8y agoRosetta 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/ https://www.asteroidmission.org/
- ByThyGrace 8y agoWow the "Timeline" section in the asteroidmission.org website is one gorgeous animated infographic. Thanks for the link!
- evanb 8y agoThere's also one with the fixed stars held... fixed. https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040 https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040
- ars 8y agoWow! A lot of what I assumed was dust was actually faint stars.
- mirimir 8y agoBeautiful.
- Mithaldu 8y agoAnd 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: https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168 https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168
- Shivetya 8y agoreally they should replace the OP link with this.
- karlshea 8y agoThat'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.
- imh 8y agoGiven how quickly the stars are moving, is the comet rotating quickly, or is it a timelapse?
- chrischen 8y agoI believe you are seeing dust.
- ajuc 8y agoThere is dust in the foreground and stars in the background. It's easy to distinguish because stars don't move relative to each other.
- p0z3t 8y agoSomeone posted it further up, but this stabilized gif really clarifies the difference well: https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040 https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040
- draugadrotten 8y agoThe comet was spinning with a period of about 12.4 hours, according to http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/58368-hu-keller-et-al-2016/ http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/58368-hu-keller-et-al-2016/ (so yeah, timelapse)
- bwang29 8y agoTo 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
- mark_edward 8y agoTo 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.
- tenaciousDaniel 8y agoJS is poorly understood in comparison This might be the most hilariously ridiculous true statement I've ever heard.
- Tepix 8y agoIn javascript: x == x _ is true. Good. x == !x _ is also true. Oops? And guess what: Array(3)==",," _ is also true. But NaN == NaN _ is false. Math.max()>Math.min() _ is also false! but then again Math.max()<Math.min() _ is true. Madness, I tell you!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bjoli 8y agoI just looked at the famous left-pad for the fastest way o implementing a pad function in JS. I asked a friend that does web dev and it is apparently pretty idiomatic JS. Pretty appalling. I finally understood why people claimed it was "hard to get right".
- knbknb 8y agoThis 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.
- Faaak 8y agoFor 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=PLgx5PMpgonqUD1aO3g0bZ_a7VKg8VGTeS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trljrwTbr4w&list=PLgx5PMpgon...
- skc 8y agoAnyone have an alternate link? Twitter is blocked where I am.
- avian 8y agoOn Imgur: https://i.imgur.com/GoMXGWm.gifv https://i.imgur.com/GoMXGWm.gifv
- Gravityloss 8y agoESA 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.
- Sharlin 8y agoYeah, 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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrctxlVWm_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrctxlVWm_E [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vlOgN_3QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vlOgN_3QQ
- orbital-decay 8y agoTo 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.
- FranOntanaya 8y agoThere aren't a whole lot of cases where Planetary Society aren't doing the better job. Two that come to mind for me are Marc Rayman's Dawn journal https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/blog/author/marc-rayman/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/blog/author/marc-rayman/ and HiRISE's outreach https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/
- neolefty 8y agoIsn'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.)
- amarant 8y agodamn! those are some gnarly slopes! any word on when spaceX will start doing ski-trips? ;)
- MindTwister 8y agoOriginal here, in better quality: https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168 https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168
- carusooneliner 8y agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvGdoya8g4k
- bd 8y agoUnfortunately 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 http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/rosetta/rosetta.webm [50MB] http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/rosetta/rosetta_stars.mp4 http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/rosetta/rosetta_stars.mp4 [28MB] ----- Edit: in case my server doesn't hold up, here are video mirrors on Streamable: https://streamable.com/w2wgj https://streamable.com/w2wgj https://streamable.com/dg3r0 https://streamable.com/dg3r0 (seems better quality than Twitter and YouTube)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nullbyte 8y agoYou're very talented, this is dope. Thanks for taking the time to make this and share it with us!
- bd 8y agoCredit should go to landru79, he keeps finding interesting things in Rosetta's raw data. I basically just tried to correct for Twitter's terrible video handling by re-tracing his steps :) Go check landru79's Twitter feed, there are many more interesting comet images and videos (e.g. he combines multiple frames into color images): https://twitter.com/landru79 https://twitter.com/landru79 BTW here are original ESA images: https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/index.php?/category/410/start-73 https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/index.php?/category/410/s...
- Tloewald 8y agoThanks for giving credit where it's due and your own work. I note that landru posted a GIF which is ironically much nicer than the video: https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040 https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 8y agoI 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?
- kerbalspacepro 8y agoThe orbiter was 13km above the comet at the time these pics were taken.
- onion-soup 8y agoAgain, 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?
- zeeveener 8y agoEvery frame is 12 seconds, I believe.
- mrb 8y agoThe 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/start-60 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×
- mikeash 8y agoThank you! I couldn’t figure this out, as I thought the probe was shut down on impact. This makes much more sense.
- dghughes 8y agoI 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoWould love to see this with the stars and high energy particle hits edited out.
- Lionsion 8y agoThis 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
- cpeterso 8y agoWhat 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. :)
- yosyp 8y agoConfirmed: 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.