This image of the nucleus of Halley's comet comes from the Giotto spacecraft.
Click on image for full size
JPL
Measurements from Halley's comet
Things that we learned from the spacecraft which visited Halley's comet in 1986 are
- what a comet nucleus looks like up close (no one had ever seen the nucleus before)
- that the nucleus had craters on it
- that evaporation occured only from cracks in the surface
- how big the coma is, compared to the actual nucleus (100,000 miles vs. 15 miles)
- that instead of being bright like a surface made of ice, the nucleus was "dark" as if the ice were covered with something
- how the magnetic field of the Sun responded to the presence of the comet coma
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