Rosetta is an amazing probe launched by the European Space Agency. In 2014 it will go into orbit around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and actually deploy a lander to sample the surface!

That rendezvous is still years away, but the target is now in sight: Rosetta has returned its first image of the comet.

Oh, very cool! The top image is the wide angle shot, showing a densely-populated star field toward the center of our galaxy; from Rosetta that’s the direction to the comet. The second image zooms in a bit, and you can see some distant stars and nebulosity. The bottom one has been processed to remove the stars, and the nucleus of Churyumov-Gerasimenko stands out.

Note that this image was taken when Rosetta was still 163 million kilometers (100 million miles) from the comet — that’s more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun! That’s why it took a total of 13 hours of exposure time to see the comet in these images; it’s still extremely faint from that great distance.

These pictures are important for several reasons: they test the cameras, a critical event for the upcoming encounter; they provide navigation cues, allowing ...