ROSETTA COSIMA: Cometary Dust Mass Spectrometry and Operations 2002-2016

Rosetta COSIMA data contains the operational history of 72 dust collecting substrates from the Rosetta orbiter's COSIMA instrument. The dataset includes calibrated housekeeping and raw spectra with onboard automatic mass calibration for the period from 2002-05-29 to 2016-01-12. It was produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and supersedes five previous versions of the COSIMA dataset.

Use Cases

• Analyzing dust collection operations based on substrate exposure, storage, and imaging events.
• Studying instrument health and functionality based on housekeeping telemetry data.
• Investigating mass spectrometry results from dust particles based on TOF-SIMS spectra and peak data.
• Examining the timeline of instrument anomalies and recoveries based on operational history descriptions.

Strengths

• Covers a long operational period from 2002 to 2016.
• Includes data from 72 distinct dust collecting substrates.
• Supersedes and corrects errors from five previous dataset versions.
• Contains both calibrated housekeeping data and raw spectra.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The description notes a period where SIMS data became scientifically unusable due to an instrument failure.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Data collected by the COSIMA (Cometary Secondary Ion Mass Analyzer) instrument onboard the Rosetta orbiter.

Time Range

2002-05 29 to 2016-01-12

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 06:08:09.316252; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Vicinity of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.