Take your seats because the show is about to begin.
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe is edging ever closer to the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for what is expected to be one of the most daring space encounters in history.
Wednesday saw the satellite successfully complete the fourth of its 10 planned thruster manoeuvres.
These are designed to get the mission into orbit around the 4km-wide comet on 6 August.
Today (Thursday), the separation between Rosetta and its icy quarry is about 165,000km.
“We’re now less than half the Earth-Moon distance. That’s how close we are now,” explained Prof Holger Sierks, who leads the Osiris camera team on Rosetta.
“I think anybody on the street will understand that — it’s actually really close-by in space.”
The picture at the top of this page is the first of what will be a regular release now from Prof Sierks and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, in Göttingen, Germany.
The comet may not be much to look at just yet — it is now barely a pixel across — but it will simply get bigger and bigger, BBC informs.
