Images of the asteroid taken from two different angles (Source: ESA)
An ESA space probe successfully captured images of an asteroid millions of miles away from Earth
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft recently completed an asteroid fly by in which it flew within 500 miles of the asteroid Steins, which is located 220 million miles from Earth.
The Steins asteroid, identified as Asteroid 2867, is located in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The diamond-shaped asteroid has a 3-mile diameter and was likely created after a larger asteroid broke apart during the early times in the solar system.
Even though the fly by was considered a success, an unexpected issue with one of the cameras aboard the space probe caused a bit of concern for researchers.
"The software switched off automatically," said Gerhard Schwehm, the mission manager and head of solar systems science operations at ESA. They are not sure at this point what exactly happened and are currently looking into the issue. "The camera has some software limits and we'll analyze why this happened later." This was not considered a major issue for the mission’s success and the operation is expected to continue as planned.
A different wide angle camera was able to capture images and send them back to ESA researchers in Germany. The camera turned on by itself and does not pose a threat to the rest of the mission, flight managers said in a statement.
The instruments aboard Rosetta have studied the asteroid's orbital motion, shape, density and rotation of the small asteroid that has an odd shape.
The ESA hopes to have Rosetta land on a comet in 2015, which will hopefully help scientists understand the origin of the planets in Earth's solar system. Astronomers have said for a long time that asteroids can be best described as the DNA of the solar system, because the galactic matter making up early asteroids also helped create the planets.
Rosetta will hopefully land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in late 2014.
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