Rosetta leaves asteroid Lutetia after a close encounter. Click for larger. Credit ESA via Science@NASA

The ESA spacecraft Rosetta is a comet chaser launched in February 2004 atop the powerful Ariane-5 rocket from launch facilities in French Guiana.  The comet Rosetta is ultimately going to reach is Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in May 2014.

You’d thing that huge rocket would send the comparatively small spacecraft right to the comet, but that’s just not the way things work.  Rosetta is having to take kind of the long way around, including two trips into the asteroid belt and taking advantage of gravitational speed boosts by a flyby of Mars (in 2007) and three flybys of Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009).  If you’ve ever been on a long ride with kids in the back seat you know the drill, instead ESA has people like me in the back seat going “are we there yet – are we there yet?”).

It’s a good thing for us in every long trip there are bound to be some worthwhile sights along the way and in this case it’s an asteroid named Lutetia.  The image above is a shot of Rosetta leaving Lutetia and if you look close or better yet click on the image to make it larger you will see Saturn in the background.

You can see this image and more including close ups at Science@NASA and even more at the ESA Rosetta webpage.