Rosetta

Posted: 14 November 2007 in Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , ,

The second fantastic photo of Earth from space I’ve come across in as many days was taken by the Rosetta comet probe sent up by the European Space Agency (ESA). The Rosetta craft made big news recently when it was mistaken for an asteroid that was going to make a near-Earth pass. The Minor Planet Center failed to cross check the object against known probes and so sent out an alarm before realizing their mistake. Rosetta is using the Earth as a slingshot to propel it into the outer solar system (4.4 billion miles) to the Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After that it will return to Earth for another gravitational slingshot.

Earth as seen by the Rosetta probe.

About these ads

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s