Rosetta takes a glance at Pluto

On Sunday, 12 July 2015, OSIRIS, the scientific imaging system on board ESA's spacecraft Rosetta, took a glance towards the rim of our Solar System. Instead of studying comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as in the past 15 months, the instrument took a peek at Pluto. NASA's space probe New Horizons passes by the distant dwarf planet today. An exposure time of more than three hours and sophisticated image processing were necessary to detect Pluto in the OSIRIS images taken from a distance of more than five billion kilometers. Pluto is thus the most distant body within the Solar System that Rosetta has ever looked at.

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