"Martin Brown" wrote in message ...

On 13/11/2014 00:38, RichA wrote:
What the heck? Even the non-comet images look like they were taken by a
VGA digital camera, circa 1995.

That is probably not too far from the truth.

Space qualified kit that gets built into a landing probe that takes a
decade to arrive tends to be very conservative in their design and
capabilities. Design started soon after 1993 funding approval so they
would be quite limited in their choice of low power imaging sensors.

The lander to orbiter uplink is only 16kbaud and it has a whole 4W of
solar panel to power everything in addition to its batteries. See:

http://web.archive.org/web/201401081.../584_read-386/

http://www.theguardian.com/science/g...et-in-pictures

Not many photos have been released yet. A few others on the twitter feed

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23Come...sh&mode=photos

The lander does have a panoramic camera and if they can get back in
touch with the thing and it hasn't already drifted off into space then
we might get a proper view of the actual landing site today.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

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My beef is the BBC harping and hyping on about the comet's speed. They
obviously don't realise our own Moon is hurtling around the Sun (along with
the Earth) at 30 km/sec, 108,000 km/hour, 67,500 mph.
If we can match speed with the Moon or Mars or any other planet,, what's
the big deal matching speed with a comet?
--Ravi