Darmstadt: The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of kilometres from earth yesterday, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said.
Rosetta caught up with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867, on Friday night in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The probe came within 805 kilometres of the asteroid.
Officials at the European Space Agency (ESA) were not sure exactly what caused the camera to balk.
"The software switched off automatically," said Gerhard Schwehm, the mission manager and the head of solar systems science operations at ESA.
"The camera has some limits and we'll analyze why this happened later," he said.
Another wide angle camera was able to take pictures and send them to the space centre.
Rosetta is four and a half years into a 6.5-billion-kilometre journey that will cause it to loop Earth three times and Mars once.
It is on its way to a rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.
