The best well known comet: 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

If you regard comets as big old dirty snowballs, boringly uniform and featureless, this photo will set you straight. 

A newly released image, which was captured in February 2016 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft and was processed by amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson, reveals Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as a little world unto itself, with an eye-catching diversity of exotic terrain.

"It shows the uneven, shadowed surface of the comet in detail; particularly prominent just to the right of center is an upright feature surrounded by scattered depressions, rocky outcrops and debris," ESA officials wrote in an image description Monday (Aug. 6).

The image of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was captured by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft on Feb. 10, 2016, and was processed by amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson. ESA released the photo on Aug. 6, 2018.

As it happens with many comets, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is a dark body with a large proportion of carbon compounds, in addition to ice.  Vapour and dust jets appeared from different zones of the body surface

The image show precisely, that a relatively dark landscape with many cavities that are probably formed as a result of losses of mass and chunks of rocks slowly falling after been ejected.

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (abbreviated as 67P or 67P/C-G) is a Jupiter-family comet. originally from the Kuiper belt with a current orbital of 6.45 years,  a rotation period of approximately 12.4 hours and a maximum velocity of 135,000 km/h (38 km/s; 84,000 mph).

Churyumov–Gerasimenko is approximately 4.3 by 4.1 km (2.7 by 2.5 mi) at its lonst and widest dimensions. It was first observed on photographic plates in 1969 by Soviet agestronomers Kim Ivanocych Churyumov and Svetlana Ivanovna Gerasimenko after whom it was named. It came to perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on 13 August 2015.