Rosetta spacecraft’s comet develops dusty envelope

Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (center), is starting to grow a dust envelope, which extends over 1,300 kilometers from its core, according to images taken by a camera aboard the Rosetta spacecraft. The globular cluster M107 appears in the upper left.

ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of ESA’s Rosetta mission, is getting dusty. New images show a hazy envelope, or dust coma, developing around the comet’s core. The comet makes one full rotation in 12.4 hours, 20 minutes shorter than astronomers previously thought.

The new data will be factored into Rosetta’s rendezvous with the comet, which is slated for August 2014.

Ashley Yeager is the associate news editor at Science News. She has worked at The Scientist, the Simons Foundation, Duke University and the W.M. Keck Observatory, and was the web producer for Science News from 2013 to 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a master’s degree in science writing from MIT.