The European Space Agency‘s Rosetta spacecraft has beamed back some astonishing photos of Lutetia, an asteroid lurking somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.
The largest asteroid ever visited by a satellite, Lutetia is a crater-blasted, elongated slab of rock measuring 80 miles long and 4.5 billion years old.
In the awesome image below – while the craft was still 22,000 miles away from Lutetia – you can see the planet Saturn in the background.
The spacecraft came within 2,000 miles of the asteroid and bagged a set of incredible photos using an OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) camera.
Although craft was thousands of miles away, it still managed to produce photos of than 200 feet in resolution as it hurtled by at around 9 miles per second.
The whole flyby took less than a minute, making these results all the more remarkable.
Rosetta still has more work to do, with a rendezvous with its primary target, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, set for 2014.
