This week, Rosetta spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA) clicked an exquisite picture of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The probe snapped the picture when the comet was perfectly backlit by the sun.

While providing details on the recently clicked image, officials at ESA said that the spacecraft captured the image when it was a few hundred kilometers downstream of the vapor and dust pushed off by the Jupiter-family comet. According to the space agency, the duck-shaped object is on a course to move out of the solar system, but it’s still active.

“Thanks to the combination of a long, four-second exposure, no attenuation filter and a low-gain setting on the analogue signal processor of NAVCAM, the image reveals the bright environment of the comet, displaying beautiful outflows of activity streaming away from the nucleus in various directions”, said the ESA.

The Rosetta probe, which has been studying the comet for the last over two years, will continue its work to keep a close tab at 67P with a current orbital period of 6.45 years. Mission controllers have planned a touchdown in September this year.

About the mission, ESA officials said that this year’s landing will be a smooth one. The mission controllers will make sure that the probe keeps on sending data for a long time after landing on the surface of the comet. The mission will end the ESA’s whole project.

In the meantime, the agency has planned to collect as much information as it can about the comet. Currently, the probe is collecting data on the 4km-wide wanderer’s tail.

The latest picture has been captured by the probe’s navigation camera system, as per the agency. At present, the comet and Rosetta are about 400 million km from the sun.