DARMSTADT, Germany: Scientists at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Operations Center said yesterday the Rosetta satellite successfully completed its flyby of an asteroid millions of miles from Earth, a mission that may bring man closer to solving the mystery of the birth of the solar system.

Rosetta rendezvoused with the Steins asteroid, also known as Asteroid 2867 — currently in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter — just after 8:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) yesterday at a distance of just less than 805 km.

The deep spacecraft, launched in March 2004 from French Guyana, is 402 million km from Earth.

“We won’t have results until later tonight, but so far everything that we tested worked,” the mission’s manager Gerhard Schwehm told The Associated Press before a press briefing. “We didn’t have to make two corrections we thought we might have had to make; we’re excited, we’re confident.”

Agency officials said they were maneuvering the satellite away from sunlight and that it would be moving too fast at certain points of the evening for antennae to make radio contact.

That data will be parsed for details and research, Schwehm, said. “Dead rocks can say a lot,” he added. The data and pictures will be analyzed and unveiled to the world today.

The timing of the flyby means the asteroid will be illuminated by the sun, making it likely the transmitted images will be clear and sharp.

Astronomers have had to work with limited data from brief flybys, such as when ESA’s Giotto probe swept by Halley’s Comet in 1986, photographing long canyons, broad craters and 3,000-foot hills.

Steins is Rosetta’s first scientific target as it makes its incursion into the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter en route to its destination, the comet 67/P Churyumuv-Gerasimenko, which is scheduled for 2014.