Rosetta Closing In

This image of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by the Onboard Scientific Imaging System (OSIRIS) on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft on June 4, 2014. Unlike images of comet 67P obtained at the end of April, no signs of an extended dust coma are evident.

At the time the image was taken, 267,000 miles (430,000 kilometers) separated spacecraft from comet. The image was taken with OSIRIS' Narrow Angle Camera in the orange filter as one of a sequence of images supporting optical navigation.

The scientific imaging system OSIRIS was built by a consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottigen, Germany, in collaboration with Center for Studies and Activities in Space, University of Padova, Italy; the Astrophysics Laboratory, Marseille, France; the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalucia, Spain; the Scientific Support Office of the European Space Agency, The Netherlands; the National Institute for Aerospace Technology, Torrejón 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

More information about Rosetta, visit http://www.esa.int/rosetta.

For publicly released image use, see ESA's Copyright Notice Images.