Comet 67P from 1,200 Miles Away
This view from the OSIRIS instrument on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft shows the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimernko from a distance of 1,210 miles (1,950 kilometers).
The image was taken on July 29, 2014. One pixel in this image corresponds to approximately 120 feet (37 meters).
The bright neck region between the comet's head and body is becoming increasingly distinct as Rosetta approaches and its view improves.
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. JPL, 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.
OSIRIS was built by a consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottigen, Germany, in collaboration with the Center for Studies and Activities in Space, University of Padova, Italy; the Astrophysics Laboratory, Marseille, France; the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain; the Scientific Support Office of the European Space Agency, The Netherlands; the National Institute for Aerospace Technology, Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain; the Technical University of Madrid, Spain; the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Uppsala University, Sweden; and the Institute of Computer and Network Engineering of the Technical University, Braunschweig, Germany. OSIRIS was financially supported by the national funding agencies of the German Space Agency, Cologne, Germany; National Centre for Space Studies, Paris, France; Italian Space Agency, Rome; Ministry of Education and Science, Madrid, Spain; the Swedish National Space Board, Solna, Sweden; and the European Space Agency Technical Directorate, Paris, France.
For more information on the U.S. instruments aboard Rosetta, visit http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.gov.
For publicly released image use, see ESA's Copyright Notice Images.