The wide angle camera of rosetta

Abstract

Abstract. Rosetta was the ESA cornerstone missions which investigated the comet 67P/Churuymov-Gerasimenko. One of the on board instruments was the OSIRIS imaging system, which included the Wide Angle Camera. This camera was designed, realized, integrated, aligned and tested at the Padova University. Several challenges had to be faced and solved, due to stringent requirements and the very peculiar mission profile which foresaw a long interplanetary travel with very different thermal environments. Rosetta has been a very successful mission which returned plenty of fundamental information about comets and more in general about the solar system origin. In this paper we summarize the main characteristics of the WAC and describe one of the many scientific results that it had returned.