An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A → comet with an irregular → nucleus of roughly 3 × 5 km across orbiting the Sun between → Jupiter and → Earth with a period of 6.45 years. The comet has been observed from Earth on seven approaches to the Sun: in 1969, 1976, 1982, 1989, 1996, 2002, and 2009. It was also imaged by the → Hubble Space Telescope in 2003, which allowed estimates of its size and shape. It arrived at → perihelion on 13 August 2015. In 2014 the → European Space Agency probe → Rosetta, launched in 2004, was placed on an orbit around 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Over an entire year, as it approached the Sun, Rosetta mapped the comet’s surface and studied changes in its activity.

See also: → comet; Named after its discoverers, Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko, Ukrainian
astronomers, who first noticed the comet in 1969.