The comet nucleus imaged on approach. It's the 6th of August 2014 - a remarkable day in astronautical history as Rosetta has finally rendezvoused with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. A thruster burn of 6.5 minutes duration finally brought it to a speed relative to the nucleus of 1 meter/sec, as the process of orbit insertion begins, after a 10 year, 6.4 billion km journey. The speed of the comet (and the spacecraft) in their shared orbit around the Sun is of the order of 15.3 km/sec. Transmission time from spacecraft to Earth is about 22 minutes. The remarkable accompanying images shows that Comet 67P is indeed an irregularly-shaped body, making the task of quantifying its gravity field (prior to the landing in November) an interesting and challenging one.
RSS Feed
