ROSETTA-ORBITER 67P COSIMA: Cometary Dust Collection Operations, 2002-2015

The Rosetta COSIMA instrument data contains the operational history of 72 dust collecting substrates from the Rosetta orbiter mission. This dataset covers operations from 2002-05-29 to 2015-06-30, including expose, storage, spectra, and imaging activities. It was produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and supersedes all previous COSIMA dataset versions.

Use Cases

• Analyzing instrument health and operational functionality based on the history of substrate operations.
• Studying dust collection and analysis timelines based on the exposure and SIMS data periods.
• Investigating instrument failure and recovery events based on the described timeline from 2014-10-23 to March 2015.

Strengths

• Covers a 13-year operational period from 2002-05 29 to 2015-06-30.
• Contains data from 72 distinct dust collecting substrates.
• Supersedes multiple previous dataset versions (RO-C-COSIMA-3-V1.0, V2.0, etc.), indicating consolidation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The description notes a period where SIMS data was scientifically unusable (from 2014-10-23 onward).
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Instrument operations data from the COSIMA instrument on the Rosetta orbiter.

Time Range

2002-05-29 to 2015-06-30

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 17:18:20.348435; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Vicinity of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko