15 February 2011

Latest Stardust NExT Images

Posted by Ryan Anderson

Images are still trickling down from the successful flyby of comet Tempel 1 last night. Here is the latest image:

You can start to see some details in this one! I was amused to see that the NASA website listing the new images claims that this was taken from a distance of 587.8 trillion miles away! If something looks wrong about that number to you, you’re right. That’s equivalent to about 100 light years. Quick! Point Stardust NExT’s miraculous camera at some exoplanets! Oh well, the Stardust NExT team managed to re-use a spacecraft to flyby a comet that it was never intended to visit, so I guess I’ll cut them some slack on their unit conversions in their figure captions.