For the first time, scientists have seen a comet surrounded by a "snowstorm" of big ice chunks, as seen in pictures from NASA's EPOXI mission. For the mission, the spacecraft known as Deep Impact swooped through the halo of ice, dust, and gas surrounding comet 103P/Hartley 2, coming within 435 miles (700 kilometers) of the comet's nucleus. Initial views of some of the roughly 32,000 pictures of Hartley 2 showed an odd, drumstick-like nucleus spewing jets of material from its knobby ends. (source: news.nationalgeographic.com)
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