New Delhi:
A year after Rosetta spacecraft has crashed into the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency (ESA) has shared a hidden image from spacecraft before it struck a comet.
According to the reports, the picture was taken at an altitude of 20 meters above the surface of comet 67P.
Initially, Scientists believed that they had retrieved all the images Rosetta had taken. But after the final probe of the spacecraft's final transmission, they surprisingly revealed one more image which is a blurred photo captured a few feet away from the comet's surface.
Scientists did not get all the images from Rosetta mission, they got pictures into packets of data. The final images were split into six packages each, making up 23048 bytes per image. This final image is not complete – only three telemetry packages were received.
The last photo came into existence has incomplete layers which mean that Rosetta disintegrated pictures into six telemetry packets before sending the final image back to Earth. But after sending three packets, the transmission was interrupted, sending over just half of what's supposed to be a complete image.
Due to the inability of the Rosetta spacecraft to collect enough energy to go on, the scientists decided to crash-land Rosetta in 2016. European Space Agency has launched the Rosetta spacecraft in 2004, en route to Comet 67P, passing by Mars and asteroids 21 Lutetia and 2867 Šteins on its way there.
This was the first spacecraft to ever orbit a comet nucleus and also the first to fly alongside a comet as it headed toward the inner solar system.
