The Wide Angle Camera of the ROSETTA Mission

This paper aims to give a brief description of the Wide Angle Camera (WAC), built by the Centro Servizi e AttivitàSpaziali (CISAS) of the University of Padova for the ESA ROSETTA Mission to comet 46P/Wirtanen and asteroids 4979 Otawara and 140 Siwa. The WAC is part of the OSIRIS imaging system, which comprises also a Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) built by the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique Spatiale (LAS) of Marseille. CISAS had also the responsibility to build the shutter and the front cover mechanism for the NAC. The flight model of the WAC was delivered in December 2001, and has been already integrated on ROSETTA.