Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
A Jupiter-family comet
A nucleus of ice and dust four kilometres long, shaped like a rubber duck: two lobes joined by a narrow neck, darker than charcoal and about half as dense as water. Every six and a half years it swings in from beyond Jupiter's orbit to pass between Earth's and Mars', and as it warms it throws off jets of gas and dust.
ESA's Rosetta orbited it for two years, the first spacecraft to accompany a comet, and on 12 November 2014 set down Philae, the first lander on a comet's surface. Philae bounced at Agilkia and came to rest at Abydos, both marked here; Rosetta itself ended its mission on the comet in September 2016.
Key figures
- Size
- 4.1 × 3.3 × 1.8 km and 2.6 × 2.3 × 1.8 km, its two lobes
- Mass
- about 10 billion tonnes
- Density
- 533 kg/m³, about half that of water
- Rotation period
- about 12.4 hours
- One orbit of the Sun
- 6.44 years
- Closest to the Sun
- 185.5 million km
- Farthest from the Sun
- 849.7 million km
- Discovered
- 1969, by Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko
- Rosetta's arrival
- August 6, 2014
- Philae's landing
- November 12, 2014
- End of the mission
- September 30, 2016