Deep Impact Spacecraft's First Glimpse of Comet Hartley 2
Jet Propulsion Laboratory https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ Sept. 8, 2010
This first image of comet 103P/Hartley 2 was taken from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft 60 days prior to the spacecraft's flyby of the comet.
Seven successive one-minute exposures taken by the spacecraft's Medium Resolution Imager were combined to make this single image. The exposures were taken on Sept 5 beginning at about 6:30 a.m. PDT (9:30 a.m. EDT, 13:30 UTC). The comet was 60 million kilometers (37.2 million miles) from the spacecraft when the set of images were taken.