It’s been 19 months since the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko ended, but the probe’s pictures stirred up a fresh flurry of excitement this week.
Or are those snow flurries?
The excitement is over 33 pictures that were snapped back on June 1, 2016, and posted to Rosetta’s online archive last month. The sequence, captured from a distance of several miles over the course of about 25 minutes, shows the comet’s Cliffs of Hathor with boulders strewn about.
One by one, the pictures are interesting enough. But when a Twitter user with the handle Landru79 (a.k.a. Jacint Roger Perez) put them together in a one-second animated GIF, the scene really came to life.
