Comet Wild-2. Cratered surface of Comet Wild-2,as seen by the Stardust spacecraft's navigation camera on 2 January 2004. Stardust was around 500 kilometres from the 5-kilometre-wide comet. Comets are bodies of rock and ices that periodically pass through the inner solar system. Comet Wild-2 was discovered in 1978 and has a small orbit for a comet,orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Stardust collected cometary dust samples to be returned to Earth. It passed by the comet at a speed of six kilometres a second. Stardust,launched in 1999,took 5 years to reach Comet Wild-2. It will return to Earth in January 2006. Cometary dust is a sample of material from the early solar system | |
Lizenzart: | Lizenzpflichtig |
Credit: | Science Photo Library / NASA |
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