Giotto

Mission Profile

Giotto was ESA's first deep space mission, launched on 2 July 1985 aboard an Ariane 1 rocket to conduct a close flyby of Halley's Comet on 13-14 March 1986 at a distance of only 596 km from the nucleus. Surviving a hailstorm of cometary dust that briefly disabled the spacecraft, Giotto's Halley Multicolour Camera returned the first close-up images of a cometary nucleus — revealing a dark, potato-shaped body 15 km long with bright jets erupting from sunlit regions. The mission confirmed that Halley's nucleus is black as coal, covered in a crust of organic material with water-ice geysers erupting through it, revolutionizing our understanding of cometary composition. After its Halley encounter, Giotto was retargeted to comet Grigg-Skjellerup in 1992, making it the first spacecraft to visit two comets.