Rosetta Comet In Action (Animation)

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A short-lived outburst from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was captured by Rosetta's OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2015. The image at left was taken at 13:06 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (6:06 a.m. PDT), and does not show any visible signs of the jet. It is very strong in the middle image captured at 13:24 GMT (6:24 a.m. PDT). Residual traces of activity are only very faintly visible in the final image taken at 13:42 GMT (6:42 a.m. PDT).

The images were taken from a distance of 116 miles (186 kilometers) from the center of the comet. The jet is estimated to have a minimum speed of 33 feet per second (10 meters per second) and originates from a location on the comet's neck.

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.

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

More information about Rosetta is available at http://www.esa.int/rosetta.