small Rosetta rant

Today the Rosetta comet landing took place, and I was/am very pissed off at not seeing anything.
They did not even mount a GoPro to the lander? No videocamera at all?

We get presented some beefed up soundfile as if the comet makes a cute dolphin noise, but that's not even the real sound.

They promised a picture from the surface of the comet, but failed to present one...

This whole landing thing comes over so silly and orchestrated.




All that high tech and not even a simple live hd video camera.



That ranting helped a little... but not much 

I ranted a bit soon... they finally did produce a picture as promised.


The quality is excellent.



http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/Welcome_to_a_comet





Ofcourse the landing is quite an achivement, but with all that money spend on the mission not even a bit of live video footage and then producing such a bullshitquality picture.

I see what you're saying, but consider this:  Launched in 2004, landed a probe on a target 2 1/2 miles wide that's moving at 25,000 mph, 300 million miles away.  That's a staggering achievement.  Was HD streaming video even available 10 years ago? 

And think of the bandwidth.  I would have loved to have seen live video too, but I guess the mission had to prioritise the science, i.e. finding out what comets are really made of.  And those still pictures are fantastic.

Oh and that overexcited scientist on the news almost knocked herself out with her own breasts.

You're right, and 2004 is quite long ago.

Almost forgot how poor the quality of digital photos was back then, specially from compact camera's.

The camera on your phone is way way better than the cameras used on this mission,shame they couldn`t of got hold of military grade optical equipment like NASA though.

Camera technology has advanced quite a bit since then. Still I wonder if they really couldnt afford better camera's, cause they had better camera's back then, only very expensive. Considering the amount of money spent:

Quote :

What is the total mission cost?
The total mission cost of Rosetta is close to 1.4 billion Euros of which the total Philae costs are 220 Million Euros (in 2014 economic conditions) including expenses for the one year launch delay. The mission cost covers development and construction of the spacecraft and all of its instruments, including the lander, together with launch and operations.

http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Frequently_asked_questions


Bandwidth for sending pics sucks, but doesnt seem too slow for sending a file of a few megabytes. Though maybe the limited batterylife plays a role...

wiki wrote:

Bandwidth 7.8 bit/s (S band)^[4]
               28 kbit/s (X band)^[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)