Last week a suite of eight peer-reviewed papers were published in Science magazine, detailing the first results of the Rosetta mission. The papers are open-access, so you can go read them all if you want. And don't miss the supplemental materials! The publication of these papers means that the OSIRIS camera team has finally released a large quantity of closeup images of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken in August and September of last year. Since OSIRIS images and derived data products are such a rare treat I figured I'd post them all here and discuss them based on the two papers and also my notes from the Rosetta presentations at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, which I never wrote up because I lacked the images to illustrate them!

Two papers concerned these images: "On the nucleus structure and activity of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko", by Holger Sierks and coauthors, which I'll refer to as the nucleus paper, and "The morphological diversity of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko", by Nicolas Thomas et al, which I'll call the morphology paper. The nucleus paper primarily described the images and the basic properties of the comet, while the morphology one ventured a little deeper into the fascinating landscapes on the comet's surface.

First, some geographical terminology. There are now agreed-upon names for 19 geomorphic regions on the comet, using names from Egyptian mythology. Regions on the head have names of female deities, while regions on the body have names of male deities. In the supplementary material to the morphology paper they say that the boundaries between regions were drawn "at sharp changes in surface morphology (e.g., rough vs smooth surface) or clear structural/ topographical boundaries (e.g., ridge or edge of a depression)." One of the speakers at AGU -- I no longer remember who -- got a laugh out of the audience by pointing out that there is a location on the comet that is now named the "Hapi-Babi region."