Sixty-nine days before it gets up close and personal with a comet, NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft successfully photographed its quarry, comet Tempel 1, at a distance of 39.7 million miles.
The image is the first one of a number of such images that will be received from the craft in the next few weeks, and will aid the navigators of the craft to better plot its course, and avoid collisions/encounter with any rogue rocks.

Comet Tempel 1 (Courtesy: NASA)Deep Impact is comprised of two parts, a "flyby" spacecraft and a smaller "impactor." The impactor will be released into the comet’s path for a planned high-speed collision on July 4. The crater produced by the impact could range in size from the width of a large house up to the size of a football stadium and from 2 to 14 stories deep. Ice and dust debris will be ejected from the crater, revealing the material beneath.
The Deep Impact spacecraft has four data collectors to observe the effects of the collision - a camera and infrared spectrometer comprise the High Resolution Instrument, a Medium Resolution Instrument, and a duplicate of that camera on the impactor (called the Impactor Targeting Sensor-ITS) that will record the vehicle’s final moments before it is run over by comet Tempel 1 at a speed of about 23,000 miles per hour.