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Bruce Murray Space Image Library

Rosetta's shadow

Rosetta's shadow
Rosetta's shadow This sequence of 12 images taken by Rosetta's OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on February 14, 2015 captures the spacecraft's shadow against the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The images were taken about six kilometers above the comet’s surface. At that altitude, Rosetta did not completely block the Sun as seen from the surface, so the shadow is fuzzy rather than sharp and spans about 20 by 50 meters. The image frames are about 228 meters across. They appear to change in brightness because OSIRIS was rotating different-color filters across the optics from one image to the next. ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA