67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
OVERVIEW
] COMET67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a Jupiter-family comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 3.46225 . It has a mass of 9.92×10¹² and an effective radius of 1.7 . It was discovered in 1969.
The rubber-duck-shaped comet that Rosetta orbited for two years and Philae landed on in 2014 — the first landing on a comet nucleus.
- WHAT IT IS
- Jupiter-family comet
- HOW FAR
- 3.462
- HOW BIG
- 1.7
- ONE ORBIT TAKES
- 6.44
Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.
The radius of a ball that would look the same size — the body itself is not round.
One trip round the Sun.
IMAGES
] 2 FRAMES- ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
CC BY-SA 4.0 - Justin Cowart
CC BY 2.0
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
CATALOG DATA
] 12 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS
What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.
- Rotation period
- 12.76129
THE ORBIT
The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.
- Orbital period
- 6.442
- Eccentricity
- Inclination
- 7.04
- Longitude of ascending node
- 50.14
- Argument of perihelion
- 12.8
- Mean anomaly
- 8.86
- Element epoch
- 2457305.5000
- Perihelion passage
- 2457247.5887
- Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
- 0.256932
- Orbit class
- JFc
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- First observed
- 2008-06-01
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 3 DESIGNATIONS- Comet 67P
- Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
- Common name Churyumov-Gerasimenko
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 1 SERVICEEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- JPL Small-Body Database67P
The orbit these elements were taken from, with its uncertainty, its close approaches and every observation behind the fit.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/67p-churyumov-gerasimenko
@misc{spacecatalog_67p-churyumov-gerasimenko,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/67p-churyumov-gerasimenko},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from JPL Small-Body Database.}
}The values above were taken from JPL Small-Body Database — No licence stated; citation requested. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.
That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: Solar System Dynamics. (Downloaded 2026, October 1). Small-Body Database Query. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 3 ITEMS- Towards a coupled activity-fallback model for comets I) 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's water activity from a microphysics model with dynamic dust-depth2026-10-09 · arXiv · PAPER · Nicholas Attree, Yuri Skorov, Pedro Gutiérrez, Olivier Groussin, Abhinav Jindal, Raphael Marschall
- Pre-accretional irradiation of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko constituents2026-09-26 · arXiv · PAPER · Inès Sansberro, Nicolas Fray, Hervé Cottin, Cécile Engrand, Donia Baklouti, Christelle Briois
- High water D/H ratio of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is consistent with a low-metallicity origin2026-09-11 · arXiv · PAPER · Kenji Furuya, Martin Cordiner, Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, Dennis Bodewits, Colin Orion Chandler, Maria N. Drozdovskaya
arXiv · UPDATED DAILY