This image of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 was obtained on 4 July 2005 by one of the European Photon Imaging Cameras (EPIC) on board XMM-Newton.
With silicon chips that can register extremely weak X-ray radiation, these advanced Charge-Coupled Device cameras (CCD) are capable of detecting rapid variations in intensity, down to a thousandth of a second and less!