67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

We landed a little robot on this comet in 2014 — the first time anyone had landed on one! It is shaped like a rubber duck, and its gravity is so weak you could jump right off it.

🕒 When can I see it?🚀 Travel there

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — Drawn, not photographed.

What it is

Rubber-duck-shaped comet, target of ESA's Rosetta orbiter and the Philae lander, first comet landing.

Comet: A dirty snowball that grows a tail near the Sun. Every kind of thing there is →

How to find 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Its position moves, so there is no fixed place on a map to point at. The Planetarium works out where it is for your own place and date.

Show me 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in tonight's sky

What you will really see

Through a small telescope, on a good night

A fuzzy patch with, if you're lucky, a soft tail sweeping away from the Sun.

🔭 See it drawn as it looks through a telescope

🖨️ A sheet to print for this

🖨️ Print a sheet and go and look

🖨️ Sheet to take outside →

Worth knowing about 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is shaped like a rubber duck — two lumps joined by a 'neck', each about the size of a small mountain. Ranges from about as close as Earth to almost as far as Jupiter. Sunlight takes 29 minutes to reach 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — on average, because that distance changes as it goes round. Its day: ~12.4 hours.

Its weather: As it nears the Sun, jets of gas and dust erupt from cracks in its crust.
How it moves: About 6 and a half years.
The machines we sent: ESA's Rosetta orbited 2014-2016 and dropped the Philae lander in 2014, the first-ever comet landing.
What makes it worth knowing: Gravity is roughly 100,000 times weaker than Earth's — light enough that a gentle jump could send you drifting off into space. This is exactly what almost happened to the Philae lander in 2014: its anchoring harpoons failed to fire on touchdown, so it bounced right back off the surface, sailed nearly 1 km up, and didn't settle down again for almost two more hours.

How did anyone measure the Earth in the first place?

The numbers

Across	4 km
Distance from the Sun, on average	1.24 AU to 5.68 AU, average ~3.46 AU · sunlight takes 29 minutes
Once round its orbit	6.4 Earth years
Made of, among other things	water, carbon dioxide