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Preparing for impact

30 May 2005

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This is a false-colour composite image of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 taken during the night of 4/5 May with the EMMI instrument on the NTT telescope. It shows the comet at 100 million kilometres away from Earth. The coma extends more than 30 thousand kilometres from the comet nucleus.

North is up, the exposure time is 30 seconds in the V filter (associated to the blue channel), 45 seconds in R (green) and 30 seconds in I (red). The images were obtained by M. Baes and M. Castillo, on behalf on the international team led by Olivier Hainaut (ESO, Chile).

As the images in the various filters were obtained one after the other, and as the comet is moving in front of the background objects, the two stars visible in this image appear as sequences of coloured dots. The comet itself appears only very softly coloured, as its dust reflects almost uniformly the light from the Sun.

Credits: ESO

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Rosetta’s 11-year expedition began in March 2004, with an Ariane 5 launch from Kourou in French Guiana, and the spacecraft was then sent towards the outer Solar System. The long journey includes three gravity assists at Earth (2004, 2007, 2009), one at Mars (2007), and two asteroid encounters: (2867) Steins (2008) and (21) Lutetia (2010).

Rosetta will reach Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, and will be the first mission ever to orbit a comet’s nucleus and to deliver a lander, called Philae, on its surface.

Ensuring that the spacecraft survives the hazards of travelling through deep space for more than 12 years is one of the great challenges of the mission.

Credits: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

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The Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal is ESO's premier site for observations in the visible and infrared. All four unit telescopes of 8.2-metre diameter are individually in operation.

Credits: ESO

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