It’s almost TAG time! On October 20, 2020 NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will slowly descend from its orbit 2,500 feet (770 meters) above Bennu to briefly touch the asteroid’s pebbly surface with its TAGSAM instrument, quickly sucking in and filter-capturing a small amount of material which will be returned to Earth for scientific study in 2023….
Tag: OSIRIS
Rolling Boulders on a Comet
See that big rock there? (It’s easy because there’s a big yellow arrow pointing to it.) That’s a 100-foot/30-meter wide boulder that was imaged sitting on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by ESA’s Rosetta on May 2, 2015. Nine months later Rosetta captured another image of the same area in which that huge stone had…
Long Before it Captured a Comet, Rosetta Caught These Views of Mars
These days the world is looking in awe at the incredible images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft. But it took Rosetta over ten years to arrive at the comet, during which time it got some great views of other worlds in our Solar System as well: Earth (a couple of times), the asteroids Lutetia and…
Been Waiting for Hi-Res OSIRIS Images of Rosetta’s Comet? Here They Are!
Many of the images we have been seeing of Rosetta’s comet – 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, or 67P for short – have been captured with the spacecraft’s NavCam instrument. And while they have been amazingly beautiful in their own right, NavCam isn’t Rosetta’s best camera; that distinction goes to OSIRIS, the Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System…
New OSIRIS Image of 67P Shows a Color Picture of a Black and White World
Many of the images we’ve been seeing of the craggy surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as incredible as they are, are still monochrome. Now Rosetta’s OSIRIS team has released a true-color image of the comet taken with it high-res science imaging instrument… but even then it’s still pretty much grey.
Where’s Waldo – er, Philae? Rosetta Captures Bouncing Lander on Camera
On Wednesday, Nov. 12 2014, after over ten years and literally hundreds of millions of miles of travel, ESA’s Rosetta mission successfully put its Philae lander down on the surface of a tumbling comet 316 million miles from Earth. While Philae’s long-awaited landing was deemed a success, if just in that all primary mission science data was…
Lights in the Dark 