Sunday, July 19, 2015
Rosetta Snaps Picture Of New Horizons
Well here's something that doesn't happen every day!
While the whole world has been fascinated with the fly-by photos of Pluto, one photo that is pretty amazing kind of got over looked. The above photo was taken by the Rosetta spacecraft, which was launched by the ESA (European Space Agency) to fly over to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Two days before New Horizons reached the dwarf planet, the ESA turned the Rosetta spacecraft to focus on Pluto, and in an extremely rare event, took a picture of Pluto and New Horizons. There haven't been very many photos taken by one spacecraft of another spacecraft while hurtling through space. And if you're wondering why the ice planet is just a dot, the two spacecraft were separated by 3 billion miles! That, and the Rosetta's camera, OSIRIS, isn't a telescope. It was created for taking pictures of the comet 67P up close, as opposed to planets billions of miles away.
The comet 67P is less than a month from reaching it's closest point to the sun, which means things on the comet are going to start getting interesting real quick. As it approaches the Sun, the comet will begin to heat up, and start expelling debris from it's surface. That means we're going to be getting a lot of valuable data, and I'm sure some more really cool pictures!
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