Thursday 11 June 2015

Philae Lander ???

There has been a recent posting on the possible location of Philae. Here - as in "click here"   
is a link from June 11 following the trail. Quoting from this link:

"To address this issue, scientists working with OSIRIS team member Philippe Lamy at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) and the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in France began searching for special sets of OSIRIS images.
In particular, they looked for images taken before and after Philae’s landing under nearly similar illumination conditions, to reduce the chances of being fooled by transient surface features glinting. In that way, if something new appeared after landing, it could be Philae.
Scanning a broad area encompassing the expecting landing zone, the team identified a promising candidate that is seen on two images taken on 12 and 13 December, a month after the 12 November landing, but not on an image taken earlier, on 22 October. The candidate is also featured in the montage earlier in the post, at top-left."
 The video can be seen from the ESA link above and going down that page to the "image" with the red overlay labled "CONSERT ellipse", just over half way down the ESA page, separate window. It has an arrow for the video: click and watch, rather impressive. Sorry I could not load my copy of the video; it is 10MB.
"This movie shows a zoom into a 13 December 2014 OSIRIS narrow-angle camera (NAC) imagetaken from a distance of about 20 km from the centre of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. A large number of bright spots are seen: as only one (at most) of them could be Philae, the majority must be associated with surface features on the comet nucleus. The movie ends on a promising candidate located just outside the "CONSERT" error ellipse (marked): this candidate was not seen in 22 October 2014 images, but appears in images taken on both 12 and 13 December 2014."












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