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The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19] Small Solar System objects are classified by their orbits: [20] [21]
Halley's Comet is a short-period comet that is consistently visible to the naked eye from Earth, [16] appearing every 72–80 years, [17] though with the majority of recorded apparations (25 of 30) occurring after 75–77 years. It last appeared in the inner parts of the Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in
Comet Encke / ˈ ɛ ŋ k i /, or Encke's Comet (official designation: 2P/Encke), is a periodic comet that completes an orbit of the Sun once every 3.3 years. (This is the shortest period of a reasonably bright comet; the faint main-belt comet 311P/PanSTARRS has a period of 3.2 years.)
The comet was thus a serendipitous discovery, but one that quickly overshadowed the results from their main observing program. [7] Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was the ninth periodic comet (a comet whose orbital period is 200 years or less) discovered by the Shoemakers and Levy, thence its name. It was their eleventh comet discovery overall ...
On 6 August 2014, the spacecraft reached the comet and performed a series of manoeuvers to eventually orbit the comet at distances of 30 to 10 kilometres (19 to 6 mi). [14] On 12 November, its lander module Philae performed the first successful landing on a comet, [ 15 ] though its battery power ran out two days later. [ 16 ]
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67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (abbreviated as 67P or 67P/C–G) is a Jupiter-family comet. [10] It is originally from the Kuiper belt [11] and has an orbital period of 6.45 years as of 2012, [1] a rotation period of approximately 12.4 hours, [9] and a maximum velocity of 135,000 km/h (38 km/s; 84,000 mph). [12]