Image credit: ESA
ESA’s Rosetta comet-chaser has photographed itself in space at a distance of 35 million kilometres from Earth. The CIVA imaging camera system on the Philae lander returned this image as part of its testing in May 2004.
The back of a solar panel is seen here, with contours on the panel are illuminated by sunlight and surfaces of the spacecraft main body are recognisable at lower right.
The CIVA imaging system consists of six identical micro-cameras which will take panoramic pictures of the comet’s surface, when Rosetta arrives at its target in ten years’ time. A spectrometer will also study the composition, texture and albedo (reflectivity) of samples collected from the surface.
Original Source: ESA News Release
Few space images are as iconic as those of the Horsehead Nebula. Its shape makes…
It stands to reason that stars formed from the same cloud of material will have…
We go about our daily lives sheltered under an invisible magnetic field generated deep inside…
When the first stars in the Universe formed, the only material available was primordial hydrogen…
On 9 January 2024, the Einstein probe was launched, its mission to study the night…
Anyone familiar with astronomy will know that galaxies come in a fairly limited range of…