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Rosetta mission selfie at 10 miles

Date:
November 12, 2014
Source:
NASA
Summary:
The Philae lander of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission took a self-portrait of the spacecraft on Oct. 7, 2014, at a distance of 10 miles (16 kilometers) from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The image, taken with Philae's CIVA camera, captures the side of the Rosetta spacecraft and one of Rosetta's 46-foot-long (14-meter-long) solar wings, with the comet in the background.
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The Philae lander of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission took this self-portrait of the spacecraft on Oct. 7, 2014, at a distance of 10 miles (16 kilometers) from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The image, taken with Philae's CIVA camera, captures the side of the Rosetta spacecraft and one of Rosetta's 46-foot-long (14-meter-long) solar wings, with the comet in the background.

Two images with different exposure times were combined to bring out the faint details in this very high contrast situation. The comet's active "neck" region is clearly visible, with streams of dust and gas extending away from the surface.

The lander separated from the orbiter at 09:03 UTC (1:03 a.m. PST) on Nov. 12, 2014, for a planned touch down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko seven hours later.

Rosetta and Philae had been riding through space together for more than 10 years. While Philae is set to become the first probe to land on a comet, Rosetta is already the first to rendezvous with a comet and follow it around the sun. The information collected by Philae at one location on the surface will complement that collected by the Rosetta orbiter for the entire comet.

Rosetta is a European Space Agency mission with contributions from its member states and NASA. Rosetta's Philae lander is provided by a consortium led by the German Aerospace Center, Cologne; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen; French National Space Agency, Paris; and the Italian Space Agency, Rome. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the U.S. participation in the Rosetta mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Rosetta carries three NASA instruments in its 21-instrument payload.

For more information on the U.S. instruments aboard Rosetta, visit: http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.gov . For more information about Rosetta, visit http://www.esa.int/rosetta .


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Cite This Page:

NASA. "Rosetta mission selfie at 10 miles." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 November 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141112114224.htm>.
NASA. (2014, November 12). Rosetta mission selfie at 10 miles. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 19, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141112114224.htm
NASA. "Rosetta mission selfie at 10 miles." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141112114224.htm (accessed March 19, 2024).

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