The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla has posted an excellent, updated "Comets and Asteroids" poster showing, to scale, all such bodies visited by spacecraft so far.

The latest addition is, of course, 21 Lutetia!

She's done an excellent job of correlating images sizes and scales. Access her full post and the full-size image here. -- Daniel

 

 

 

 

 

A really nice way to end our Lutetia fly-by coverage! Stuart Atkinson, one of our regular blog visitors, runs his own excellent science & astronomy outreach efforts in the UK (visit his site: Cumbrian Skies). Stuart's sent in a poem this morning in celebration of Rosetta's fabulous results of yesterday. Thanks Stuart! -- Daniel

For all these years you were merely
A smear of light through our telescopes
On the clearest, coldest night; a hint
Of a glint, just a few pixels wide
On even your most perfectly-framed portraits.
But now, now we see you!
Swimming out of the dark - a great
Stone shark, your star-tanned skin pitted
And pocked, scarred after aeons of drifting
Silently through the endless ocean of space.
Here on Earth our faces lit up as we saw
You clearly for the first time; eyes wide
With wonder we traced the strangely familiar
Grooves raked across your sides,
Wondering if Rosetta had doubled back to Mars
And raced past Phobos by mistake –
 
Then you were gone, falling back into the black,
Not to be seen by human eyes again for a thousand
Blue Moons or more. But we know you now,
We know you; you’ll never be just a speck of light again.

 
© Stuart Atkinson 2010 

 

 

All images credit/copyright:

(C) ESA 2010 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA 

 

At a distance of 36 000 km, the OSIRIS Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) took this image catching the planet Saturn in the background.  

 

Farewell Lutetia!

 

Approach images of Asteroid Lutetia. The first image was taken at 06:18 (about 9.5 hours before closest approach, 510000 kms from the asteroid), the last one at 14:15 (about 1.5 hours before closest approach, 81000 km from the asteroid.). The resolution changes from 9.6 km/px to 1.5 km/px.

 

 

Final sequence of images before closest approach (CA-8, CA-4:40, CA-2, CA-1:50)

 

Zoom into detail with grooves and craters.

 Zoom in on a possible landslide and boulders at the highest resolution.

 

 

First pre-flyby images now available! Largest view of Lutetia shows asteroid at a distance of 80,000 km. Better yet to come!!

All images: CREDIT: (C) ESA 2010 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA 

 

 

 

 

 

Lutetia was discovered in 1852 from the Paris balcony of French painter turned astronomer Hermann Goldschmidt. To honour his home city, he called it 'Lutetia', after the Roman name for Paris. It was an early vindication of Goldschmidt's career change.

He became interested in astronomy after attending a talk by the great French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier, of the Paris Observatory. The previous year, Le Verrier had correctly predicted the position of the then unknown planet Neptune, sparking its discovery. The mathematical success made him famous. His Paris lectures were timed to coincide with an easily visible lunar eclipse in 1847. He clearly inspired Goldschmidt.

Captivated by the possibilities for discovery, the painter bought a telescope, appropriately enough with the proceeds from the sale of two portraits of Galileo. He set it up on his sixth floor apartment's balcony and began to sweep the skies.

Lutetia was his first discovery, made on the evening of 15 November 1852, but not his last. During the next nine years, he discovered 13 more asteroids making him the most successful asteroid hunter of his generation.

He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1861, and has a crater on the Moon named after him. - Stuart

 

... by Rosetta Spacecraft Operations Engineer Andrea Accomazzo. Team seems to be quite happy!

Update from Rosetta Spacecraft Operations Manager Andrea Accomazzo in the Rosetta Dedicated Control Room at ESOC:

• The 'flip' slew was complete as of 12:05 UTC (14:05 CEST)
• Rosetta is now being tracked by NASA's DSN 63 station at Madrid (70m antenna)
• We will use Navigation Camera 'A' for autonomous tracking during the flyby (there are two, 'A' & 'B')
• Rosetta is now about 110,000 km from Lutetia
• Rosetta will enter the autonomous tracking (asteroid flyby mode) by 16:45 CEST

-- Daniel

 

  Some of the Rosetta Flight Control Team in the Dedicated Control Room a little earlier this afternoon

 

I've been in contact with astronomer Andy Rivkin, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Maryland, USA. He was in the news recently as the leader of one of two teams that found ice and organic material on the asteroid Themis. That discovery was made with the same telescope Andy had used to study Lutetia almost 15 years earlier. So this flyby has a special meaning.

We really don't know what to expect from Lutetia, which is exciting..

-- Andy Rivkin

He agreed to answer some questions via mail - access details under 'Full story' -- Stuart

 

 Full story »

Live webcam picture of ESA's 35m DSA at Cebreros, Spain, now tracking Rosetta. Image refreshes every minute; click for full-size version here. Note: webcam timestamp is off by one hour - we'll update it shortly.

 

 

Current ground station pass started at 13:05 CEST - ESA/ESTRACK Cebreros (CEB) 35m & NASA/DSN Madrid (MAD) 70m -- Daniel

Richard Moissl on the OSIRIS team just wrote: "We are closing in at a steady pace (less than 330,000km distance to the asteroid now) and the narrow angle camera is starting to resolve surface structures." -- Daniel

This just in from Richard Moissl, working on the OSIRIS team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research here in Germany. Richard writes: "Since 6:18 UTC (08:18 CEST), Osiris has been imaging the approach with both cameras, the narrow angle camera (NAC) and the wide angle camera (WAC), collecting images with 10-minute intervals."

The OSIRIS team will keep us updated (and we'll pass along info right here in the blog) - and we are looking forward to seeing the results of their work later today! A quick reminder: one of the unavoidable limitations to publishing images will be download slots. -- Daniel

 

In an email just now, the Rosetta flight controllers confirmed that commands to switch the spacecraft into its carefully designed Asteroid Fly-by Mode (AFM) are being uplinked. Very positive news! AFM will start at Rosetta as of 14:45 UTC -- Daniel

Welcome to this exciting day for Rosetta! Later today, the spacecraft will fly by the mysterious asteroid Lutetia. For those scientists who worked on ESA’s Giotto mission, there is a sense of déjà vu. Eighteen years ago to the very day, Giotto flew past the comet Grigg-Skjellerup.

It was a hot summer night in ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany, in 1992 when Giotto slipped past comet Grigg-Skjellerup at a distance of just 200 km.  A forerunner of ESA’s Rosetta mission, Giotto had performed a spectacular flyby of Halley’s comet in 1986. It then went on to an extended mission because, although damaged by the Halley encounter, which saw dust smashing into the spacecraft at speeds of almost 70 km/s, it still had 60 kg of fuel left on board.

Click to watch video: 20 Years after Giotto
Twenty years ago, in 1986, Comet Halley had its latest
rendezvous with the Sun and spectators here on Earth.
Only months before, ESA had launched its first deep-space
mission - Giotto. Its destination, Comet Halley.

The comet chosen was Grigg-Skjellerup and the encounter distance was much closer, too. This was possible by although Giotto tore past Halley ‘head-on’, obtaining its last image at a distance of 6500km, it would only coast through Grigg-Skjellerup’s path at a more oblique angle. Also, the second comet was much less active at producing dust than Halley.

During the pass, Giotto's Energetic Particle Detector (EPONA) captured data that suggested Grigg-Skjellerup had broken in two but the spacecraft captured no images to look for the fragment: the camera had been ‘sandblasted’ to destruction during the Halley flyby. The collision of a single dust particle in 1986 had set Giotto spinning, exposing the instruments to the torrent of comet dust. As a result, the camera was damaged beyond resuscitation. Today, Rosetta will return images. Its target is an asteroid, not a comet, and so it does not make so much dust. The cameras are all working and the first pictures are expected to be released at 23:00 CEST tonight. Stay tuned! -- Stuart Clark