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NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft has caught it’s first glimpse of the “comet of the century” flying toward Earth.

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The glimpse came as ISON (also known as Comet C/2012 S) passed Jupiter and sped toward the centre of the solar system.

The Deep Impact captured ISON at a distance of 793 million kilometers.

“This is the fourth comet on which we have performed science observations and the farthest point from Earth from which we’ve tried to transmit data on a comet,” Tim Larson, project manager for the Deep Impact spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. “The distance limits our bandwidth, so it’s a little like communicating through a [dial-up] modem after being used to DSL. But we’re going to co-ordinate our science collection and playback so we maximize our return on this potentially spectacular comet.”

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