A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really... "Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question. -Narrator, "Stardust"
Late last night, the NASA mission Stardust flew within 178 km (110 miles) of the nucleus of the comet Tempel 1, seeing it up close for the first time since July 2005! Here's one of the better images from closest approach:
[Click to embiggen.] Wow! The whole flyby sequence has been posted on NASA's Stardust site (and Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society blog has created a nifty animation of it too). Ian O'Neill, from Discovery News, posted a nice animation of it as well on YouTube:
[embed width="610"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXcqEf92Fe4[/embed]
To give you an idea of what you're seeing here, the comet is roughly 7.6 x 4.9 kilometers (4.7 x 3.0 miles) in size. So, ...
