We're received a couple of emails from several colleagues around ESA and at the science teams working on Rosetta from other institutes. They've kindly sent in some of the data they've seen during the swingby campaign, and herewith we'd like to publish a couple of cool 'techie' updates.

The first came in from Anders Eriksson, the PI (principle investigator) for Rosetta's RPC-LAP at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Uppsala, and the second from ESA's Petteri Nieminen, working on Rosetta's SREM instrument at ESA/ESTEC, the Netherlands. Click on 'Full story' for details. -- Daniel

This received from Anders (click image for high-res):

Nice blogging on the Rosetta ESB3! Perhaps you are interested in the attached plot (above): I confess it isn't as sexy as the Osiris images, but it is fun in that it shows the thruster firings on November 10 (night). When the thrusters are fired (for reaction wheel offloading, in this case), a portion of the gas released gets ionized by the solar UV radiation, creating a plasma cloud easily detected by the Langmuir probes of the RPC (Rosetta Plasma Consortium), turned on since Monday night. We knew the time slot for the wheel offloading, but not the exact timing: however, from the data we can say that they did three thruster firings within a few minutes, and we can quite accurately time them.

At each firing, we see a sudden jump in the probe potential, decaying at a slower rate as the cloud disperses. The scale at the left is really in volts, showing the potential of one of our probes with respect to the spacecraft. The three peaks reach different height, probably just because of a sampling effect (we only take one sample per second for the moment).

This came in from Petteri (click image for high-res version):

These diagrams show the SREM radiation measurements as Rosetta passed through the Earth's radiation belts during the fly-by.

The top two panels: The distance of Rosetta from the Earth is shown in Earth radii, together with count rates for three of the SREM channels. The TC3 channel is sensitive to electrons (>500 keV) and protons (>10 MeV), TC1 for electrons (>2 MeV) and protons (>27 MeV), and S34 for protons only (>11 MeV).

The bottom two panels show the Earth's magnetic field strength, and the derived electron fluxes in different energy ranges as a function of geomagnetic coordinates.

Credits: ESA/ Paul Buehler / PSI

  Thanks guys!!