Unless you correct the images for lens distortion the matches will be all over the place. Looking at the ESA releases you can see the correction:
http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-co...st-panorama.jpg

No, these are the first 6 images:
http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/54945-first-com...anoramic-image/

You're missing this one:


It will be interesting trying to figure out if the new image partially matches with one of the first images.

Anyway your "brightned" images are very interesting; did also ESA release such "enhanced" versions?


As you like, but circles over your images mean that you are assuming that CMOS FOV is lower than 30°, but we know just two possible FOV values: 35° (external circle) and 30° (internal).

I think these images are distorted to be looked at from above.
In my model I'm looking at them from cameras points of views, so I must use raw undistorted images.

I don't know if looking at my model with undistorted images from above results in "actual" aerial view of the area.

Barrel distortion will be there at any viewing perspective. The coefficients are actually given in the document scalbers linked to previously, "Determination of the Geometric Distortion of the CIVA-P QM Cameras", (see the tables in section 3.1). A decent explanation of the distortion can be found in the OpenCV documentation here.

Edit: Just noticed that same document also gives a good explanation starting on page 13.

Exactly the same I posted, only processed differently. There are different sources for the same images with different stretches. My versions are just a stack of all the releases.

The image you say I'm missing it's the first image on the sequence I posted.
All this has been discussed earlier on the thread. The image sources are there.

Yes, they are arranged in a circular fashion to give an more or less vertical view. A kind of polar projection.
Even if you have the full uncropped raws, you'd need to correct them for projection » see Orthographic projection.

Sorry, I didn't get these are exactly same image!




I tried brightening the dark one, but nothing emerged from black background.

(I found official CNES releases of enhanced CIVA images)
http://www.cnes.fr/web/CNES-fr/11557-gp-de...ama-de-civa.php

Amyway I noticed just now that all these images are reduced versions of the original 1024x1024 images...

Yes, reduced and very likely cropped.
That dark image has an alternate brightened release, where the landing leg is cut of. It's on your link.
You can't get any more that out of the release images since those are converted to 8bits. The original data has a higher dynamic. If we had it, we could try to do an HDR version.
But since we have the different releases, we can stack them (as I did) and recover part of the original information.
Here I've recovered some details on the rock face highlights:
Click to view attachment

It's uncertain if the release images are the full frames or not.
I think they are not, with the areas with no information around the edges cropped.
But it's just my opinion, I don' have any more data then you

I missed this official release of enhanced images two weeks ago!

http://aliveuniverseimages.com/speciale-mi...osetta-e-philae

I don't think there was an official release of the rolis post-landing images (ie on the various official Rosetta image sites). But the images were made public at the conference.

It's probably better to source images closer to the horse's mouth, either the conference site or the first link in this forum. We had lot's of discussion of those images following that post (including anaglyphs...).

The ROLIS surface images - lit by Blue, Red, Green, and Infra-Red - stereo images and an inset to demonstrate albedo were presented by Stefano Mottola at AGU14, between 9m05s, 10m30.
Click to view attachmentClick to view attachmentClick to view attachment

http://www.space.com/28183-philae-comet-la...mple-fails.html

Program of a local German TV Station about the search: Was macht eigentlich die Sonde "Philae"? 'What's the probe "Philae" doing?'
Due to some laws in Germany it might be only available online for one week and I hope it's available in general outside of Germany.

Lots of general TV blabla about the mission, but it also features Holger Sierks and two (as they say) unpublished pictures. He says, that they still haven't found it because of the high contrast region where Philae came down.

Fred Goesmann (COSAC PI) is also interviewed, placed right in the middle of the lab, where he supposedly analyses the data: "I have to be careful not to interpret something into the data that I want to see, but is not really there, like staring on a Rorschach Test. Is it a butterfly you see or only an ink mark?" Moreover a deadline for publication of the results at end of January is mentioned. If that's true, this should also apply for the other instruments on Philae. But given the time a review process takes, we should have to wait a little longer for the first publications.

Although the official deadline for submitting abstracts to the LPSC has passed, the programme and abstracts are not due to be posted online until 29th Jan. If that's the date they're referring to then the delay in releasing the latest information may not be very long.

The images have not been shown anywhere yet. But even if you have them in your hands there is no obvious lander visible. If you count the 3 pixel dots you have several dozen landers.



The "lab" is the room where the ground reference model is in a vacuum chamber. The room is used to make measurements, but nobody sits there to do analysis of data, the pumps of COSIMA and COSAC are not that pleasant to listen to.

For the paper I hope the review process will be fast.

I am always gobsmacked by the knowledge of the posters here and all the different "angles" many of you have looked at to find Philae's final resting place.

One thing I seem to recall from the 2-3 days when signals were being received from Philae before the battery ran out. This was an observation by someone at ESA that on the second or third "comet day", Philae came on exactly "on time"as was expected.

Since some of you guys have already modeled 67P's rotation and are also aware of Rosetta's position at any given time as well, I would have thought a line could be drawn on the comet which would be just "visible" to Rosetta at those moments. We would then know that Philae must lie at or near that line. I understand such occurrences happened , at least, twice if not more times. Philae was "alive" about 2 days, so roughly, 4 rotations of 67P.

Intersecting that line and the various trajectories that have been considered after Philae's various bounces should be likely candidates where Philae finally rests.

Apologies if this has been considered already !

That definitely gives you some information. But the "line" is probably pretty broad, since local features like cliffs or boulders could change the time that you regain contact significantly, presumably. Still, the Rosetta team would have all the regain/loose contact times, and I'm sure they're doing what they can with them.

Agreed. But, at least, we would know if the "likely point" was to the east or west of the first landing spot. There now is doubt seemingly which way it went when it was high up.

I just took a glance at the view from Rosetta towards 67P during the ~2 days after Philae's landing, using STK & the SPICE data.

A few observations:

- ESA positioned Rosetta so that it would be directly overhead of the Philae planned landing spot. It remained close to that viewpoint during the entire two days, though it moved quite a bit further away from 67P on Nov 13th. Philae's planned landing spot is quite close to the equator, so that means that planned landing spot passes directly under Rosetta once per rotation.

- If Philae is where ESA seems to think it is (the "blue triangle" from some of the graphics ESA folks have released, which is far side of the 'head' crater, probably in a cleft on that hillside) then interestingly enough, in that spot Philae will become visible to Rosetta at almost the exact same time as the planned landing site. In other words, the start of the radio communication window with Rosetta would be almost exactly the same from this spot as with the planned landing spot. This is true even though the two sites are around a kilometer distant from each other and in quite different topographies. This is something of a coincidence and possible what initial led some of the ESA folks to conclude that they must have ended up quite close to their planned landing site.

- Both the planned landing site and the presumed final resting site are roughly on the top of the head of 67P and not too far from each other. So it is quite true that either way radio contact would start/end at *about* the same time and local features in other location could pretty precisely mimic the other location (or nearly any other location on/around the top of the head).

- If Philae were *not* in a cleft, but more on top of one of the peaks, or even one a high spot on the far hillside (vs in the bottom of a cleft in the far hillside) it would like have come into radar contact before the landing site would. The time difference in that case would be about 30 minutes.

- Where there probably was a difference in radio contact time in the presumed final vs planned landing spot, is in the *end* of the radio transmission window. Since the presumed final resting spot of Philae is (generally) on the east side of the crater rim mountains, and the comet rotates towards the eastward, in the presumed final resting spot, Philae would lose radio contact maybe 90 minutes before it would if on the flat area of the planned landing site.

- However, there are areas very near the planned landing site that would duplicate that radio profile! For instance, if it had landed just on the east side of one of several crater walls within 200-300 meters of the planned landing site, it would also cut off the radio window about 60-120 minutes earlier than if on the perfectly flat location.

We don't know the radio start and end times precisely (ESA hasn't publicly released them, that I know of) but even presuming ESA did, it probably only told them that Philae was indeed somewhere on the head, and also that local topography was somewhat affecting the radio communications window. They might have been able to deduce from that, that Philae was likely on more of an east-facing slope (or, more precisely, that some obstacle was just to the west of Philae blocking radio communications).

Also, interestingly, it looks like to me that if ESA had known Philae's exact location it probably could have positioned Rosetta nearer the south pole and had potentially a much larger communications windows with Philae. If Rosetta was positioned high over the south pole, continuous radio communications might even have been possible. But if Rosetta were positioned, say, halfway between the equator and south pole, you'd quite certainly have a noticeably longer communications window than what they did have.

(From that position, Rosetta would also have had a continuous view of the dark side of the comet--not very interesting from the visual point of view!)

Whether and how this different positioning of Rosetta for a longer communications window would have worked would depend on the details of Philae's final position, which of course we don't know even now. Whether it would have been a good idea is another question yet. But I do think it would have been possible.

Just as a cautionary note -- until the actual vs. predicted signal acquisition times are released, I would take statements made during those crazy hours of the landing and surface ops with a grain of salt.

We don't have the needed data to find Philae on the surface. Hopefully ESA does, or will in the future. But without the needed data, I believe all we here on the forum can do is guess.

-the other Doug

The search area for Philae is about 3-400m x 200m, covered with boulders, cliffs, and very rough, according to Holger Sierks (in the above mentioned tv interview on NDR, German television).
So you get lots of similar signatures in terms of signal coverage. Philae is hidden somewhere between these small structures. If there would be more constraints, they would have applied them.

Thanks for the link to the German TV programme. I don't speak German, but I got the idea.

I paused the video to try and get a good view of the images and one did seem to show a cleft/niche/alcove with two bright pixels that could have been Philae. This indeed matches the spot I have suggested for a few weeks now. Until now I have only posted on the ESA Rosetta blog, but as a regular reader of Emily's great blogs at the Planetary Society, I thought I'd post here too. Here is a link to my Flickr image for Phiaes landing. Other images can be accessed from there to save me posting dozens of images or links.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/16058382452/

P.S. Thanks to everyone for all the great posts, images, explanations etc.

If you look at the images, which was possible at thew "Night of Science" in Göttingen, it is easy to identify 10 or 20 bright, two or three pixel structures. All of those have the same chance to be the lander. With the OSIRIS image available you can not answer the question, so we need to wait for better images.

Latest ESA NAVCAM image has been posted on the Rosetta blog.

http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/...2015_NavCam.jpg

This image contains a little gem. A plume of gas and dust can be seen rising directly from the surface of the comet at about pixel 1200 x 1230. I have created a couple of closer views in the images below.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/15697071534/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/16133265469/

The feature you point to looks totally consistent in brightness and texture with other surface features in that image. If that were a real jet that bright and dense, it surely would cast a shadow.

Hard to say if it's a plume or a weird rock, without a "comparison image"

It's a rock.
Click to view attachment

Yep It's a rock formation. Thanks for the other image.

[newbie - first time poster - however I've been reading this blog since the landing and post a bit on the Rosetta blog. I like the quality of speculations / analysis done here (despite the *extremely* limited data to go on).]

Flug, I like your thoughts on the dots - however I think it is worth pursuing more as it could be something more. My hunch is that the left two dots are a kicked up object/boulder by Philae and it's shadow - it is very unlikely that such a large object would be there coincidentally with that rate, vector and size, As for the right side object, I think it may be Philae's shadow itself - it rotates, is a similar size and is in a weird position which could be consistent with a very high elevation lander.

I don't know the exact Rosetta look angles (I know Flug had a summary on them - but Brian had few posts on them as well which seem to disagree. I don't know if this data is accurate or not - but as an example of a fit to my scenario I very simply annotated Brian's picture from awhile ago: 3 dots possible trajectories figure (green is rosetta look angles, yellow is the sunline for the 6 points. ignore the complete ovals - just interested in the arcs that cover the witnessed points from the landing site.)

The point is less the exact accuracy of the picture and exact trajectory - rather the conceptual scenario. The landing kicked up a large boulder almost vertically up to make the left black object (it's CG material and it's dark and moving so less exposure time per area / more likely to be rocky angles which won't reflect back into the camera and blocking the higher light flux comet) and it's associated shadow, and the Philae trajectory can be solved assuming the right side shadow is in fact from it (admittedly it may not be - but I think it's more likely the lander than another kicked up boulder - one big boulder could be believable - several is pushing it).

Can someone gin up a Philae trajectory that fits with the right side shadow? It may dramatically change where we look for the lander (like the other direction entirely as seen in my picture!)

Hello All!
First post here, discovered this site September 2014, been following this thread since.
I've been following Rosetta mission since the beginning, albeit this is not relevant...
I'll run the risk of breaking rules, since I have an hitching question:

Did this really happen?
http://www.seti.org/weeky-lecture/rosetta-...mov-gerasimenko

ADMIN: OK, a couple of things. 1) Are you asking if the talk happened? You can assume that it did since they regularly hold talks; 2) It is recommended that you never run the risk of breaking Forum rules.

Yes, Philae bounced totally uncontrolled twice before finding a rest in its final and currently unknown position.

Interesting...

Hunt for Philae hangs in the balance - Rosetta mission would have to sacrifice other science to search for comet lander
http://www.nature.com/news/hunt-for-philae...=TWT_NatureNews

"Scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) are debating whether to change part of the Rosetta mission in what would probably be the last attempt to find lost comet-lander Philae — but the shift would mean sacrificing long-planned science."

Craig

The impression I get is that not finding Philae will have minimal impact on whether or not contact is re-established with it.

Me too...

I would go for the planned science .....

Indeed, that the lander bounced at least twice and possibly "shaved" a rim, a boulder or some other feature in between the 1st and the 2nd "bounce", before Philae eventually settled down on the surface of 67P seems to be confirmed by now... That's all we've been told thus far.

What's not clear it's the trajectory Philae followed just after the 1st bounce.
So many confusin reports... It jumped back as far as 1km, as far as half a mile... As far as ... For as long as...

As the Admin correctly assumed, I was just curious to know if anyone had "first hand information" on what was said in that particular SETI talk event. No video of that SETI's talk event, [btw: thanks jmknapp] has been uploaded after over a month, while their claim is that it usually takes 1-2 days before a video of (an) event gets uploaded/published.

I was just curious to learn if more (ACCURATE) information was disclosed, information coming from instruments on-board of the lander itself.
Hoped that SETI talk revealed some measurements (even APPROXIMATE)... Still waiting

Thanks for such a detailed post.

Would I be correct that since 67P rotates every 12.4 hours [ 29 degrees per hour ], and if I recall correctly, Philae was receiving sunlight for about 90 minutes each day [ I don't know if it was earth day or comet day ] , then the sunlight window is only about a little more than 40 degrees wide ? In other words, it is in a hole as has been speculated by many. If it is known which solar panel received sunlight for what lengths of time , a rough "shape" of the "hole" could be cinstructed. Since Philae is resting at or near the equator, the sun should be high in the sky at 67P's "noon" at that spot.

It seems more like shadowed by cliffs as the CIVA mosaics (see earlier posts in this thread) show a clear horizon in certain azimuths. 4th Rock also posted some info about the solar panels.

Two new images from ESA today. The first a NAVCAM view which includes a view of the Philae landing zone. Although a lot more of the area below the rim of Hatmehit is visible most of the CONSERT search zone is still stubbornly in shadow. The sunlight is getting closer though.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/16373930901/

The second image is of a couple of dust grains collected by COSIMA. Fascinating they are too, revealing a great deal about the structure and makeup of the cometary material. If, as the team has suggested, the "dust" is sublimation residue, if you fill the spaces in these grains with volatile ices and a a few organics, what you have is a close approximation to what the whole comet is made of. Basically tiny micron sized bits of sodium rich silicate dust particles held together by sintered, frozen volatiles, with a potpourri of organic chemicals mixed in.

The suggestion is that the smaller sub grains, the larger grains are made up of, are your basic interplanetary dust building blocks. I know there is some theoretical size limit set by the various nebulae accretion models for this basic refractory dust, it would be interesting to see how they compare.

The Dec. 16 SETI Talk The Rosetta Lander (PHILAE) mission: landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by Philae Lander Payload Manager Dr. Jens Biele finally posted to YouTube yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQLtAp1Aw48

A lot of it is review for those closely following the publicly released information to date, but there is some new information. One item of interest is that they think the harpoons failed to fire due to some miswiring so that the commands they executed weren't in the proper sequence. If true that would mean that with a modified sequence of commands they might still get the harpoons to fire, which would be of scientific interest if nothing else, since the harpoons have accelerometers and sensors that could get data about the subsurface down to maybe a couple of meters.

Attached below are some slides showing the reconstructed trajectory.

Click to view attachment Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

Couldn't the harpoons potentially also be used a last-ditch effort to move Philae out of its current position as the comet heads back away from the sun? (assuming they don't end up anchoring it as once intended..)

That came up in the question period & he seemed to acknowledge the possibility that the recoil might reposition the lander, but per his description of how they work, the harpoons come out at 70 m/s and would penetrate and anchor even in sandstone, and down to 2.5m in softer stuff, so maybe it's unlikely that the lander would go anywhere?

They could try a hop first, the person who designed the landing gear says it can make the lander hop, if they have power of course. Also it could flip it onto it's back too......

Many thanks, jmknapp! The SETI page of the event (which I kept checking again and again until this morning) still hasn't been updated with a video...

It may well never be - occasionally speakers ask that a talk not be shared or put online. That text may be boiler plate for all presentations they host.

The web site lags behind YouTube usually. They also don't show the video for the Jan. 20 talk A new model for the origin of life: Coupled phases and combinatorial selection in fluctuating hydrothermal pools but it's on YouTube.

It's best to subscribe to the YouTube channel for updates.

I was wondering if the delay was due to waiting for clearance from ESA or whoever.

Yup, I'm subscribed but didn't get any notification from YouTube of the video being available (Yes, "send update" setting is checked).
I was also suspecting it was due to some clearance issue...

One interesting comment from the talk was that ESA fought against including the lander, but ultimately lost out on that one.

Also he said that the lander mission is not ESA but rather a consortium. So how many different entities might have to sign off?

On the harpoons: I recall that before the landing there was already doubt about the proper functioning because tests with spares from the batch of pyrotechniques for firing the harpoons showed failures. Unfortunately I don’t remember where I’ve read that, but I positively remember this tidbit of information.

I followed the first link to the SETI site where the video is now available. It maybe no coincidence that the first batch of scientific results have been officially published, so it meant no toes were stepped on. I also sense a bit of a charm offensive from DLR and MPS following the criticism both on social and mainstream media, not to mention the recent comments of ESA's DG.

The specific details of the bounce trajectory, I suspect, would not have been revealed until after it was fairly certain that Philae could not be imaged. However these are some images I posted at the end of November on the ESA Rosetta blog, for those who may not have seen them already. This was before the second CONSERT projection and the third, more refined search area, shown in this video and at the AGU meeting. The NAVCAM images from the 21st and 25th of Nov both include the then unknown search area. I admit the evidence is not definitive, but in the light of the enhanced CIVAS panorama images from the AGU meeting and the more precise radar/radio location, it is increasingly looking like the prime candidate to me.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/15296825873/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/15860328136/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...in/photostream/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...in/photostream/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06/15690427237/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124013840@N06...in/photostream/

This video appears a day after the release of a week old, (they are normally only a couple of days old), NAVCAM image containing the final landing zone, still mainly in shadow. I suspect, although I don't know for sure, that may have been the last opportunity to image this area before Rosetta's orbit is changed to facilitate the Feb 14th fly-by. I think manoeuvres were due to start on the 4th of Feb. Others may know differently, a week or so later Rosetta's orbit should have taken the orbiter to a similar view point, but with a slight change in phase angle and illumination.

Thanks for the link though, it was well worth watching, if only for the different personal perspective from another team member. Carefully chosen phrases refined for the printed page are never as good as the extra information you get from ad hoc remarks, body language, intonation, humour, etc you get in a talk like this.

Per Harder's post on harpoons: I believe I first read of the suspicion the harpoons might not fire being known in advance came from the Reddit online ask-me-anything session conducted shortly after the landing. I drilled down into the minutae to a link to a YouTube video of the explosive, mentioned as nitrocellulose , not firing properly in a vacuum. If you google "nitrocellulose burn test vacuum" you'll find the video, which I did not find particularly nourishing.

I've recently read on this forum of blame later being assessed to a wiring error (my term for a software, hardware, or combo logic error) but did not track the original reference yet, nor understand the specifics.