European Rosetta Mission to Comet 67P - A Challenge for Virtual Observatory Approach

Walter Schmidt
TrackTrack 3 --Lecture Hall IX on the First Floor
DescriptionOn 2 March 2004 the European Space Agency’s ambitious mission Rosetta was launched to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August 2014 and place the Lander Philae on its surface three months later. Since August 6 the satellite is flying around the comet, taking many high resolution images, analyzing the comet surface with remote sensing instruments and measuring the dust and plasma environment of the comet. Our institute contributed hardware and software to five different instruments on board the orbiter and the Lander and additionally the Lander’s mass memory as part of the Lander control system. The presentation will cover some details of these instruments, the mission and what we have learned so far.

For operation planning and data analysis supporting information from other spacecrafts and ground telescopes have to be utilized. During the past years the Virtual Observatory approach of the astronomy community has been adapted to solar system research. Using the tools developed in the EU-FP7 projects Europlanet and IMPEx it is now possible to access automatically data from space assets stored in ESA, NASA or JAXA data archives and combine them with model simulations run in various institutes in Europe. This is made possible by the implementation of common access protocols, which allow applications to query archives, select, fetch and reformat data on the fly and merge them to compatible data products without detailed knowledge of the original archives, calibration or the diverse data formats. Examples will be shown in the presentation.
For details see the web pages
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/ ,
FMI’s Rosetta web page http://space.fmi.fi/rosetta/ ,
http://www.europlanet-ri.eu/ or the related data network site http://europlanet.fmi.fi/
and
http://impex-fp7.oeaw.ac.at/

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