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NASA has free the prototypal photos of the comet Tempel 1 condemned by its Stardust enquiry late yesterday (Feb. 14), showing the icy wanderer in the indifference as the satellite drew closer for a closer look.

The Stardust enquiry flew to within 112 miles (181 kilometers) of comet Tempel 1 at 11:39 p.m. EST yesterday (0439 instance today), and the satellite began effulgent home the prototypal of its 72 high-resolution images from the near connexion most quaternary hours later.

Mission scientists hoped the satellite would send the five photos bracketing closest approach first, but a secondary flaw prevented that from happening. The prototypal pictures to be beamed backwards to Earth were the early ones condemned by Stardust as it approached Tempel 1 from most 1,600 miles (2,575 km) away.

From such a distance, Tempel 1 has an asteroid appearance that gives it a multilateral or diamond-like look in Stardust's initial flyby photos. NASA plans to release the close-up views as soon as they are conventional and ready, officials said.

Stardust's photos of comet Tempel 1 are the prototypal newborn close-up views of the comet in nearly sextet years. In July 2005, NASA's Deep Impact satellite visited the comet and crashed a diminutive enquiry into its icy opencast to determine the essay of Tempel 1.

At the instance of its closest approach to Tempel 1, the Stardust satellite was most 209 meg miles (336 meg km) from Earth, NASA officials hit said.

NASA will hold a advise word on NASA TV later this afternoon to handle the stylish results from the newborn comet Tempel 1 flyby. The Stardust satellite took 122 photos of comet Tempel 1 during its Valentine's Day rendezvous terminal night. Of those, most 72 are expected to be high-resolution near ups of the comet, NASA officials said.

The 3.7-mile-wide (6 km) Tempel 1 orbits the sun once every 5 1/2 years, so it had prefabricated one activate around the sun since Deep Impact's visit. Stardust's meet to comet Tempel 1, titled the Stardust-NExT mission, is aimed at helping scientists wager how such the comet has denaturized during this time.

Researchers also want Stardust-NExT to map more of Tempel 1's surface, and they had hoped to wager the crevice Deep Impact created. The Brobdingnagian detritus plume upraised by the effect obscured the feature during that mission, preventing Deep Impact from effort a good look.

Stardust-NExT has logged meet over 3.5 billion miles (5.7 billion km) during its 12 eld in space. But this comet connexion will probable be the probe's terminal mission, since it destroyed up nearly every of its remaining fuel chasing down Tempel 1, researchers said.

The Stardust satellite was originally launched to meet the comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt 2), which it did in 2004. The satellite also composed samples of Wild 2 in a diminutive container, which returned to Earth in 2006.

After the Wild 2 comet encounter, NASA repurposed the Stardust enquiry to meet Tempel 1 and rechristened it Stardust-NExT (for "New Exploration of Tempel").

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