Europe's Rosetta probe has captured new images of the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet it is currently chasing through space.
The pictures reveal that the comet appears to be not one but two objects formed together, which is known as "contact binary."
Scientists don't know yet how this happened however.
The ESA launched Rosetta in March 2004 and has spent its last 10-plus years traveling through deep space.
"From what we can discern in these early images, 67P is an irregularly looking body," Holger Sierks from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, principal investigator for Rosetta's scientific imaging system, said in a statement, according to MPS.com.
There is a chance 67P suffered a major fracture in its past, though it's also possible the parts have different origins.
Regardless of how it happened, the European Space Agency (ESA) team now has additional and unexpected considerations as it tries to figure out how to land on the comet later on this year.
ESA wants to land on the comet around November 11.
"This unique occasion will secure ESA's place in history with the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet," ESA said in the release. "Later, Rosetta will orbit the comet and, in November, it will become the first mission to send a lander to a comet's surface."
The images, which are an interpolation, were taken on July 11. The actual pictures are more pixelated since the probe and comet are still pretty far away.
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