ESA's Rosetta orbited comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from 2014 to 2016, through perihelion, and released the lander Philae onto its surface: the first orbit of a comet and the first soft landing on one. The nucleus is ice and dust, 4.3 km in its longest dimension, and is rendered here from the Rosetta/OSIRIS shape model, a contact binary of two lobes joined by a neck.
The 6.43-year orbit between the asteroid belt and Jupiter, propagated from the current JPL osculating elements and cross-checked against JPL Horizons. 67P is a Jupiter-family comet; its orbit is set by repeated encounters with Jupiter. The map supports rotation by dragging, zoom by scrolling, date selection along the slider, and an on-demand ephemeris query through Live now.
Orbit: JPL Horizons osculating elements for 67P (rec 90000702, solution JPL K154/5), epoch 2026-06-19 = JD 2461210.5, ecliptic J2000; exact at epoch. Non-gravitational acceleration from outgassing is not propagated here, so single-epoch elements degrade away from the epoch. Planets: JPL/Standish.
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, discovered in 1969, was the target of ESA's Rosetta mission: rendezvous on 6 August 2014, twenty-five months in the comet's vicinity, release of the Philae lander on 12 November 2014, perihelion passage on 13 August 2015, and a controlled descent to the surface on 30 September 2016.
The model is the Rosetta/OSIRIS stereophotoclinometric SHAP5 reconstruction of the bilobate nucleus (Jorda et al. 2016). The two lobes are joined at the Hapi neck; the equivalent-sphere radius is 1.65 km for a volume near 18.7 km³. This web delivery carries 49,748 triangular facets and 24,876 vertices, mechanically converted from the PDS VRML product without alteration of its kilometre coordinates. It is loaded from Data/worlds/67p/67p.obj and shaded matte dark grey, the geometric albedo being close to 0.06. The geometry is archival mission data. Rosetta shape archive · DOI 10.26007/34vg-8s07 ↗
67P is a Jupiter-family comet whose orbit is reshaped by close encounters with Jupiter and perturbed by non-gravitational acceleration from perihelion outgassing, so a single element set holds only over a limited span. The map propagates the JPL Horizons osculating elements at epoch JD 2461210.5, which reproduce the Horizons state vector at that epoch; the derived period is 6.433 yr and the next perihelion falls on 2028 April 9. The Horizons lamp and the Live now control call body_server.py at /api/67p/ephem for an independent cross-check. Planet positions use JPL/Standish elements through the shared solar-bodies.js.
The feed calls /api/67p/latest (NASA ADS or arXiv) and falls back to a snapshot in Data/worlds/67p/research.json. The result cards are checked against the primary Rosetta papers.
67P is highlighted in cyan on a live map of the uniquely named solar-system bodies — planets, dwarf planets, named asteroids and comets — together with the interstellar objects and the escaping spacecraft, each plotted at its current position and linked to its source.