PIA13374: Deep Impact Spacecraft's First Glimpse of Comet Hartley 2
This first image of comet 103P/Hartley 2 was taken from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft 60 days prior to the spacecraft's flyby of the comet.
 Target Name:  Hartley 2
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Deep Impact 
 Spacecraft:  Deep Impact
 Instrument:  Medium Resolution Instrument (MRI) 
 Product Size:  512 x 512 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  University of Maryland 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA13374.tif (262.6 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA13374.jpg (50.98 kB)  

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This first image of comet 103P/Hartley 2 was taken from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft 60 days prior to the spacecraft's flyby of the comet.

Seven successive one-minute exposures taken by the spacecraft's Medium Resolution Imager were combined to make this single image. The exposures were taken on Sept 5 beginning at about 6:30 a.m. PDT (9:30 a.m. EDT, 13:30 UTC). The comet was 60 million kilometers (37.2 million miles) from the spacecraft when the set of images were taken.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Maryland

Image Addition Date:
2010-09-08