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Images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko acquired by the OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System) imaging system onboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft at scales of better than 0.8 meter per pixel show a wide variety of different structures and textures. The data show the importance of airfall, surface dust transport, mass wasting, and insolation weathering for cometary surface evolution, and they offer some support for subsurface fluidization models and mass loss through the ejection of large chunks of material., (Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

Images from the OSIRIS scientific imaging system onboard Rosetta show that the nucleus of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko consists of two lobes connected by a short neck. The nucleus has a bulk density less than half that of water. Activity at a distance from the Sun of >3 astronomical units is predominantly from the neck, where jets have been seen consistently. The nucleus rotates about the principal axis of momentum. The surface morphology suggests that the removal of larger volumes of material, possibly via explosive release of subsurface pressure or via creation of overhangs by sublimation, may be a major mass loss process. The shape raises the question of whether the two lobes represent a contact binary formed 4.5 billion years ago, or a single body where a gap has evolved via mass loss., (Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

Critical measurements for understanding accretion and the dust/gas ratio in the solar nebula, where planets were forming 4.5 billion years ago, are being obtained by the GIADA (Grain Impact Analyser and Dust Accumulator) experiment on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Between 3.6 and 3.4 astronomical units inbound, GIADA and OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) detected 35 outflowing grains of mass 10(-10) to 10(-7) kilograms, and 48 grains of mass 10(-5) to 10(-2) kilograms, respectively. Combined with gas data from the MIRO (Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter) and ROSINA (Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis) instruments, we find a dust/gas mass ratio of 4 ± 2 averaged over the sunlit nucleus surface. A cloud of larger grains also encircles the nucleus in bound orbits from the previous perihelion. The largest orbiting clumps are meter-sized, confirming the dust/gas ratio of 3 inferred at perihelion from models of dust comae and trails., (Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

Adaptive optics has been recently applied for the development of ophthalmic devices, with the main objective of obtaining higher resolution images for diagnostic purposes or ideally correcting high-order eye aberrations. The core of every adaptive optics systems is an optical device that is able to modify the wavefront shape of the light entering a system: once the shape of the incoming wavefront has been estimated, by means of this device it is possible to correct the aberrations introduced along the optical path. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility, although in a simulated system, of estimating and correcting the wavefront shape simply by means of an iterative software analysis of a single point source image, thus avoiding expensive wavefront sensors or the burdensome computation of the PSF of the optical system. To test the proposed algorithm, a simple optical system has been simulated with a ray-tracing software and a program to estimate the Zernike coefficients of the simulated aberration from the analysis of the source image has been developed. Numerical indexes were used to evaluate the capability of the software of correctly estimating the Zernike coefficients. Even if only defocus, astigmatism and coma were considered, the very satisfactory results obtained confirm the soundness of this new approach and encourage further work in this direction, in order to develop a system able to estimate also spherical aberration, tilt and field curvature. An implementation of this aberration estimation in a real AO system is also currently in progress.