The Asteroid/Comet Connection's
daily news journal about
asteroids, comets, and meteors

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – Rosetta status & readings

Cover: Artist's impression of the comet lander Philae ten years from now, detached from the Rosetta comet orbiter and beginning its descent to the comet nucleus, lit by the distant Sun. This rendition is an A/CC variation on the original art credited to ESA/AOES Medialab.

Rosetta status:  The Rosetta mission now has a Status Report archive, which presently includes two items. The first, from the 4th, "Rosetta in Good Health," has a launch summary and tells about initial post-launch activities such as releasing launch locks, deploying the large high gain antenna, and performing the first trajectory correction maneuver. A report dated Monday, "Activating Rosetta," tells about starting up attitude control, communication, and power systems, and configuring 25Gb of mass memory. It notes that "Substantial disturbance torques" experienced during the first few days, "attributed to the outgassing of the spacecraft," have subsided. Instrument commissioning activities are scheduled for this week, and heliocentric orbital elements are given for the spacecraft, which on Monday was more than five lunar distances from Earth.

Readings:  Palomar had its first wildfire alert of the season yesterday, when a legal burn briefly got out of control two miles from the observatory, according to an article today at the San Diego Union Tribune. Smoke and ash from nearby fires closed Palomar Observatory for a time last October.

A widely reported Reuters wire story today telling about the upcoming Intel Science Talent Search (STS) competition mentions high school student Lisa Glukhovsky and her NEO distance measuring project, which will sound familiar to long-time A/CC readers. See more about that from May 2003.

Underneath a stack of Republican Party pop-up windows at Space.com, you will find articles new today about "Avoiding A 'Crash Course' In Planetary Defense" (link) and "'Back Room' Decision to Cancel Hubble Servicing Criticized" (link).