European spacecraft flys by asteroid, camera stops

Tag : camera

At a news conference, Uwe Keller, the principal camerainvestigator, said despite the camera turning off about nineminutes before its closest approach, it switched back on againlater and was now working well. Keller said he did not expect thecamera setback to affect the rest of the mission.
Craters of different ages were found on the surface of thegray-colored asteroid, showing a "rich collisional history," Kellersaid.
The probe recorded more than 23 craters over 200 meters wide, withthe biggest being about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) wide.
According to measurements by the probe, the diamond-shaped asteroidturned out to be 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) in diameter, slightlylarger than an earlier estimate of 3 miles (4.8 kilometers).
The Rosetta craft was launched in March 2004 from French Guyana,and is now about 250 million miles (402 million kilometers) fromEarth.
Schwehm said the historic mission could give astronomers crucialclues to help them understand the creation of the solar system.
"Dead rocks can say a lot," he said.
Rita Schulz, a Rosetta project scientist, said data from asteroidsand comets was particularly valuable because they are made ofgalactic matter that helped create the planets in our solar system.
"Asteroids are a sort of memory, or the DNA, of the solar system,"Schulz said.
Up until now, astronomers analyzing asteroids have had to work withlimited data from brief flybys, such as when ESA's Giotto probeswept by Halley's Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broadcraters and 3,000-foot (1000-meter) hills.
As planned, the Rosetta lost its signal to Earth for about anhour-and-a-half Friday night as engineers turned it away from thesun and the craft zoomed through space too fast for its antennae totransmit any signal.
At 10:15 p.m (2015 GMT) Friday the craft resumed transmission,signaling that the exercise was largely successful — newscheered by ESA engineers and technicians.
Yet there was another setback Friday night as data was sent toantenna stations far from Europe.
A NASA laboratory in Goldstone, California was having problemscooling one of its antennas in the summer heat and had to switchthe ESA project to another antenna, delaying the analysis of somedata by several hours.
Rosetta data was also transmitted to an antenna in New Norcia,western Australia.
Data from its working camera was being processed Saturday at theMax Planck Institute in Lindau, southern Germany, while furtherinfrared data collected by the probe was being analyzed at theInstituto Nacionale di Astrofisica in Rome.
The Steins asteroid was Rosetta's first scientific target as itenters the asteroid belt en route to its destination, the comet67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta is scheduled to reach the cometin 2014.
Between now and then it will perform some gravitational experimentsbefore going into hibernation, Schwehm said
The European Space Agency is supported by 17 countries includingGermany, France, Ireland and the Netherlands. It cooperates withNASA, the European Union, European national space agencies andinternational partners. It's expected the ESA will become theEuropean Union space agency in the near future.
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