The European Space Agency’s deep space probe Rosetta transmitted high-resolution images of anasteroid millions of miles from Earth. Rosetta caught up with the Steins Asteroid Friday night in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Unfortunately, shortly before its closest flyby at five hundred miles, Rosetta’s narrow angle camera stopped working.

Officials at the ESA were not sure exactly what caused the camera to fail. According to the mission manager, a wide-angle camera was able to take pictures and send them to the space center, adding that the overall outlook for the data was good.

The Rosetta craft, launched in March, 2004, is now reportedly about 250 million miles from Earth. A roughly three-mile-diameter Steins Asteroid is being studied for keys that could help unlock some of the mysteries about the creation of the Solar System.

( “ I think it's a typical asteroid and asteroids are very irregular bodies, and particularly the smaller ones, they are extremely irregular, and the amazing thing seems to be that there is still one body more or less, and because the craters are very defined, some of them are very ,very defined, but maybe it's crushed, and I want to say, and there is , if you look at the sizes of the craters, then most of the interior of the asteroid may be crushed, we have to investigate this”)

According to the Associated Press, data from Rosetta’s working camera was being processed in Southern Germany, while further infrared data collected by the probe was beinganalyzed in Rome.

“I think it whets our appetite for the next things to come. It looks like we get really something out of that mission. It is a… I ‘m very pleased that it works so well.”