Year at a comet, August 2014 - NavCam, enhanced
Date: 06 August 2015
Satellite: Rosetta
Depicts: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Copyright: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
After a 10-year journey and travelling over 6.4 billion km around the Solar System, Rosetta arrived at a distance of 100 km from comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014. In the weeks that followed, it moved progressively closer, and while spacecraft operators learned how to operate in this new environment, the spacecraft's suite of scientific instruments started their detailed observations, including mapping the surface of the nucleus in search of a suitable landing site for Philae.
The image shown here was taken on 22 August at a distance of 63.4 km from the comet centre. The image scale is 5.4 m/pixel and it measures 5.5 km across. It shows the comet's small lobe to the left, with the striking cliffs – now known as Hathor – clearly visible. In the foreground on the far right, the smooth Imhotep region can be seen on the large lobe.
The image has been cleaned to remove the more obvious bad pixels and cosmic ray artefacts, and intensities have been scaled. It has been enhanced to bring out details of the comet's surface. The original image is available here.
This image is one of 12 featured in our "Year at a comet" image collection and has not been previously published.
More images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko can be found in the '67P - by Rosetta' collection.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO License. 
