Finally! It has been a long wait, but so worth it: the Rosetta OSIRIS science camera team has delivered the first pile of data from the rendezvous with comet 67P to ESA's Planetary Science Archive. I have spent a good chunk of the last three days playing with the data, and it's spectacular. Most cameras that have been sent to the outer solar system have detectors that are about 1000 pixels square; the OSIRIS detectors are 2048 by 2048, and breathtaking in their detail.

The data release covers the period up to September 16, 2014. This was during Rosetta's approach to the comet and the very beginning of its global mapping phase. During this time, Rosetta approached from a distance of 40,000 kilometers to only 29 kilometers away.

ESA provides a really cool browse tool that lets you get a feel for what's in the data. You can browse all of the Rosetta data from both OSIRIS science cameras and the Navcam engineering camera at this site. But, geek that I am, I want more information at a glance, so I set out to build my own browse pages to the data. Here they are, for your pleasure:

One of the first things people want to do with archival science data is to create color images from several black-and-white images captured through different-color filters. It turns out to be very hard to do such color processing with this data set, because the comet spins fast and is very lumpy. The perspective shifts from one image to the next, making it extremely difficult to align the different channels. Fortunately, there are experts like Daniel Macháček who can handle the challenge: