PARIS - A EUROPEAN spacecraft was on course to skim past a rock in the asteroid belt on Friday, carrying out its first scientific work on a 10-year trek into deep space, mission controllers said.
Rosetta, launched in 2004 by the European Space Agency (ESA), was to zip past a 10-kilometre asteroid - called (2867) Steins - at a distance of 800 kms, ESA said on its website.
The goal was to get rare, close-up photographs and surface scanning of an asteroid, which is believed to be rocky debris left over from the building of the Solar System.
The encounter took place 360 million kilometres from home as the unmanned craft raced through the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter, on its way to a meeting with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.
Rosetta switched on 11 instruments to scan the rock as it flashed by at 8.6 kilometres per second, or 30,720 kilometres per hour, using an optical navigation system to keep on course, ESA said.
The operation had been timed so that the spacecraft and the asteroid would be illuminated from behind by the Sun, in order to get the best pictures.
Rosetta is four and a half years into a 6.5-billion-kilometre journey that will cause it to loop Earth three times and Mars once, using the planet's gravity as a slingshot to build up speed. It had been roused from hibernation for the meeting with Steins.
Asteroids are intriguing because of the clues they offer into the physical composition of the planets and the impact of the harsh environment of space on primordial rocks.
Understanding their structure, orbit and spin is also useful for helping Earth to defend itself against any rogue rock that is deflected out of the asteroid belt and sent on a collision course with our planet.
ESA officials said they expected a break in radio contact with Rosetta for one hour, 25 minutes after the closest point of the encounter, which was at 1858 GMT (2.58am Singapore time).
The first pictures of the flyby were expected to be unveiled at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany at around 1000 GMT on Saturday. -- AFP
