NASA's EPOXI mission took this image of Comet Hartley 2 on November 2, 2010 from a distance of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). The spacecraft will fly by the comet on November 4, 2010. The white blob and the halo around it are the comet's outer cloud of gas and dust, called a coma. At this distance, the spacecraft is capturing images with a resolution of about 23 kilometers/pixel (14 miles/pixel).
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD
Note: Deep Impact's rendezvous with the comet will be later today; the Minister will update this post with more information and photos.
Update #1: The Arecibo Observatory has released a series of radar photos that show Comet Hartley 2 to look like "a cross between a bowling pin and a pickle." The nucleus of the comet is apparently more cylindrical than spherical, and may have two lobes. The photos can be seen here and here (the latter website suggests that Comet Hartley 2 may resemble Comet 19P/Borrelly, which may be a good guess).
JPL has released a short video from the Deep Impact Medium and High Resolution Imagers that show two jets blasting out of the comet within a 16-hour span. One can also get a sense of how the comet spins: it is not spinning along the narrow end (at least that we can see in this video), as a log would spin in water a la logrolling, but it is spinning lengthwise, as one spins a pen or pencil. The video, which the Minister cannot upload onto Blogger, can be watched here.
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