Rosetta's Comet, Now in 3-D

By Nancy Atkinson - August 14, 2014 at 10:53 AM UTC | Missions

You

always

have a pair of those cardboard red-blue 3-D glasses by your desk, right? Well, grab them and take a look at this view of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, just out from the Rosetta mission team. It almost feels like you're right there with the spacecraft.

Notice the cliffs (see the exposed layers there?), boulders and depressions. The 3-D image was created using two images (

you can see the two images here at the ESA blog

) They were both taken on 7 August 2014, from a distance of 104 kilometres through the orange filter of the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera. ESA says the two images are separated by 17 minutes and the exposure time is 138 milliseconds.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com