The Rosetta probe has captured new color pictures of the Comet 67P, also known as the Churymov-Gerasimenko.
The comet came into focus when the Rosetta mission was launched. The mission is to follow the comet as it orbits the sun every 6.6 years under Jupiter’s gravity.
“When Rosetta arrives at the comet it will be at a distance of about three Astronomical Units (450 million km) from the Sun. As it moves towards the Sun, the ice in the nucleus begins to sublimate and the comet begins to eject increasing amounts of dust,” the European Space Agency explained in a blog post.
Numerous pictures have been published of the comet before, but not until now have any color images--and from so close--become available.
The human team on the ground monitoring Rosetta used three images taken of the comet one after another and superposed them through filters centered on red, green, and blue wavelengths.
The color image shows how the comet, which is about 2.4 miles (4 kilometers) in diameter, would be seen by the human eye.
“As anticipated, the comet turns out to be very grey indeed, with only slight, subtle color variations seen across its surface,” the agency said.
“Painstaking work is needed to superimpose the images accurately, which is one reason it has taken so long to come up with the first meaningful color image of 67P/C-G.”
