DARMSTADT, Germany - The European deep space probe Rosetta successfully completed a flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from earth, but its high resolution camera stopped shortly before the closest pass, space officials said Saturday.

Nuclear winter is a term that describes the climatic effects of nuclear war. Severely cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or years would be caused by detonating large numbers of nuclear weapons, especially over flammable targets such as cities, where large amounts of smoke and soot would be injected into the Earth's stratosphere. The term has also been applied to one of the after-effects of a comet or asteroid impact[1][2], also sometimes termed an impact winter, or of a supervolcano eruption.[3]