I’m working with the Virtis heatmap released a while back. I wanted to see how it looked on the actual comet to get a better feel for the heat distribution.
I reprojected the press image to a Lat Long format:
Draped on shapemodel and given a 360 spin:
Mattias,
In your Virtis animation one can clearly see a dark line running down the neck. Assuming this is not an artifact, can you figure out which feature of the neck this aligns with: the boulders or the line of small pits visible to their right?
@Kamal Lodaya
What you are seeing is an artifact.
There is an area in the head/neck region where the spherical mapping coordinates that ESA choose for the source data intersects the surface three times. (a problem that happens with irregular bodies like that.) The map only displays one of the three layers. Probably the first. the other two areas gets the same data projected onto them causing this strange patterning.
A little hard to explain in text…
Thanks for the explanation, I was surprised to see such a sharp feature. I appreciate very much all your work.
Best,
Kamal
One interesting feature is the very cold roughly circular region on the upper part of the “body”. It is a craterlike structure there that apparently gets very little sun.