The European Space Agency's (ESA) Philae lander and Rosetta satellite are on the brink of following Comet 67P/C-G through perihelion.
According to BBC News, the comet will achieve perihelion, the point of orbit at which it is closest to the sun, at 3:03 BST on Thursday, Aug. 13. This distance will be approximately 186 million km from the Earth, which puts it in between the orbits of Earth and Mars.
As Comet 67P has come closer to the sun, its activity has increased and the proximity has allowed Philae to gain enough light to come out of its idle state. As the sun is warming the comet's icy core, it has been releasing a gassy tail, the signature marker of a comet.
This jet in particular took place on July 29.
"Usually, the jets are quite faint compared to the nucleus and we need to stretch the contrast of the images to make them visible - but this one is brighter than the nucleus," Carsten Guettler, a member of the Osiris camera team from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, told BBC News.
The ESA said in a statement that perihelion is expected to illuminate several nooks and crannies neither Rosetta nor Philae have been able to see thus far.
The close approach may also leave the lander and its satellite unharmed, as Comet 67P is expected to survive perihelion.
"We're only days away from that moment and the current activity doesn't show signs of being so violent as to disassemble the comet," Brendan Owens, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, told Mashable. "However, they are unpredictable objects and the Rosetta team have discovered 67P to be quite porous with over 75 percent of it being empty space, so enough outgassing either now or in the next few close passages over the coming decades could disrupt 67P's structure."
