
A one-second video taken by the Rosetta probe on the surface of a comet - mikecarlton
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/988711358358261762
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bd
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](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]

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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)

~~~
VikingCoder
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!

~~~
pawelos
Rosetta was actually built and launched by ESA, not NASA :) Still, I couldn't
agree more with your comment.

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bwang29
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

~~~
mark_edward
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.

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
_JS is poorly understood in comparison_

This might be the most hilariously ridiculous _true_ statement I've ever
heard.

~~~
Tepix
In 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!

~~~
sixothree
At least x === x, right?

~~~
dak1
const x = NaN;

x === x; // false

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evanb
There's also one with the fixed stars held... fixed.

[https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040](https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988807933243863040)

~~~
Mithaldu
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:

[https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168](https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168)

~~~
Shivetya
really they should replace the OP link with this.

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mrb
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...](https://imagearchives.esac.esa.int/index.php?/category/410/start-60)

Each picture is a 12.5-second exposure. Therefore this 25 fps video is sped up
312.5×

~~~
dghughes
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.

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ars
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.

~~~
adimitrov
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/](https://www.asteroidmission.org/)

~~~
ByThyGrace
Wow the "Timeline" section in the asteroidmission.org website is one gorgeous
animated infographic. Thanks for the link!

------
MindTwister
Original here, in better quality:
[https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168](https://twitter.com/landru79/status/988490703075463168)

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Gravityloss
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.

~~~
orbital-decay
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.

~~~
FranOntanaya
There 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/)

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Faaak
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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trljrwTbr4w&list=PLgx5PMpgonqUD1aO3g0bZ_a7VKg8VGTeS)

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knbknb
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.

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karlshea
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.

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carusooneliner
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvGdoya8g4k)

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onion-soup
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?

~~~
zeeveener
Every frame is 12 seconds, I believe.

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cpeterso
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. :)

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yosyp
_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.

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

~~~
chrischen
I believe you are seeing dust.

~~~
ajuc
There 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
Someone 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)

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nerdponx
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?

~~~
kerbalspacepro
The orbiter was 13km above the comet at the time these pics were taken.

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kevin_thibedeau
Would love to see this with the stars and high energy particle hits edited
out.

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skc
Anyone have an alternate link? Twitter is blocked where I am.

~~~
avian
On Imgur: [https://i.imgur.com/GoMXGWm.gifv](https://i.imgur.com/GoMXGWm.gifv)

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DaveSapien
This is bananas.

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eterps
You made my day, awesome footage.

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Lionsion
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

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amarant
damn! those are some gnarly slopes! any word on when spaceX will start doing
ski-trips? ;)

