☄️ Comet
Comet Hartley 2
A small, peanut-shaped comet that tumbles as it spins.
- Size
- 1.6 km across
- Goes round the Sun
- every 6.5 Earth years
- Discovered
- 15 March 1986, by Malcolm Hartley
Did you know?
- NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft, renamed EPOXI, flew past it in 2010 about 700 km away.
- Jets of gas stream out of it, which is why the mission called it “hyperactive”.
Compare Comet Hartley 2 with EarthSide by side, to scale, in the app
More NASA photos of Comet Hartley 2Straight from NASA’s image library, in the app