REAL LIFE NEWS: ROSETTA’S FINAL IMAGE DISCOVERED
by Hazed
Two years ago the Rosetta probe ended its successful 12-year mission studying the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by slowly drifting down to the surface of the rock and coming to a final rest. Now scientists have unexpectedly discovered one last image that was sent back to Earth in its final transmission.
During its descent, Rosetta transmitted a steady stream of images and measurements of the comet. Scientists from the European Space Agency thought they’d got everything they could from this transmission, but now they have reanalysed the data and found one final photo contained in a few telemetry packets on the server.
The reason the image was overlooked is because of the way Rosetta’s onboard computer split up images to be transmitted. Its final image was supposed to be split into six discrete packets of about 23,048 bytes each. But ESA scientists only got three of the packets, and at the time the image processing software couldn’t do anything with this incomplete data.
Now scientists from the Max Planck Institute decided to manually process the data and they discovered that they could piece together a coherent image from the fragments, thanks to the way Rosetta’s compression software packed the image – not pixel-by-pixel but layer-by-layer. Although half of the layers were lost, there was enough to make a complete, if blurry, picture. Click the source link below to see the image.
Source: https://gizmodo.com/scientists-unexpectedly-find-rosetta-s-final-image-of-c-1818966894
