We were happy to spot this tweet from Rosetta’s Alice instrument Principal Investigator Alan Stern over the weekend, showing the final spectrograph image obtained by the instrument moments before Rosetta impacted on to the surface of the comet on Friday:
Heading bk from Germany & the end of Rosetta's flight mission. Our Alice UV spectrograph's final image: made minutes b4 touchdown. #Proud pic.twitter.com/dLtvhtrKRl
— AlanStern (@AlanStern) October 1, 2016
We exchanged a brief email with Alan yesterday, who confirmed: “The spectrum shows the reflectance of the surface at close range with ~3m resolution — which is unprecedented for ultraviolet studies of comets.”
Congratulations Alice!
We’re looking forward to hearing more from the various instrument teams in due course as to what exciting measurements they achieved in the final hours of the mission.
