Close Approach Comet Arrives in April

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacombini-Kresák zooms past the barred spiral galaxy NGC 3198 in this photo taken by astrophotographer Chris Schur on March 14. At the time, the glowing, green comet was about 16 million miles from Earth. This "April Fool's Day Comet" will make its closest approach on April 1, passing within 13.7 million miles of the Earth.

More Info, click HERE

Philae Lander Phones Home Again

 The European lander Philae has once again contacted Earth after more than two weeks of silence.

Philae now on the surface of  Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko once again sent data to its Rosetta mothership.

Philae has had a rough start to its' cometary exploration mission. When it arrived at comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, aboard the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, drift off course for two hours before a rough landing in a shadier spot. This ment less power to its solar panels which may explain why Philae went quiet for months.  

It wasn't until the comet drew closer to the sun that Philae chould get in touch with Rosetta on June 13, then falling silent once more on June 24.  However, a transmission on July 9 confirmed Philae was working.

The lander is now ready for work 186 million miles from Earth as the comet makes its closest approach to the sun.

Halley Harbinger of Doom!

Can you wrap your head around it?  Halley's comet as the bringer of famine and death!? So it would seem.  

A recent LiveScience article suggests that the famine of 536A.D.  may have been brought about by a massive impact from a fragment of none other than the famous comet.    The climate changes brought on by the kicked up debris devastated crops and as such many people starved and sickened.  

In these weakened conditions, many people became susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in 541-542 A.D.  to go on later to be know as Europe's The Black Death!  

From the LiveScience article:

• The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540. The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth.

 Of course there is only circumstantial evidence to suggest that a fragment was present to do this level of damage.  But to do the type of damage it is suggested that  the fragment measuring about 2000 feet wide disintegrated high up in the atmosphere spreading enough dust around the globe to cause the wide spread famines that history records.  

Check out the LiveScience blog entry HERE 

Thanks to Xnewsman for the heads up

NASA's Neowise Reactivated

NASA's Neowise (previously WISE) comet and asteroid hunting spacecraft, which during its mission

discovered more than 34,000 asteroids and  158,000 more object throughout the solar system during its prime mission in 2010 and early 2011.

The spacecraft was reactivated after more than two years in hibernation.  In its new mission Neowise will  assist NASA in identifying  potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.  NEOWISE also can assist in detecting asteroids that could be considered potential targets for future exploration missions.

In preparation of its renewed mission, Neowise released its first set of test images.

Check out the complete NASA article HERE

***UPDATE*** Evidence Ison Survived

***UPDATE***
Information from the IO9 blog has some pretty disapointing news:

From the blog

• After a weekend of hemming and hawing from experts, the sun-grazing ball of ice and dust has been declared officially dead. Again. Except this time, it's pretty much for sure

As you can see, as of Nov 30 Ison had disintegrated into a dusty smudge.  The Bad Astronomy site has a killer time lapse video
Here

Evidence in the form of  material, appeared, streaming away, on the other side of the sun,  which appeared in  NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory late in the evening on Nov. 28, 2013. This seemed to

indicate that Comet ISON survived, at least in part, it's close encounter with the sun and now it is on a trajectory that will fling it out of the solar system proper.

The question now is whether it is just left over debris  or some portion of the comet's nucleus. Analysis supplied from staff at the NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign suggest that it may be at least a small portion of the comet's nucleus.

For more information on Comet ISON: www.nasa.gov/ison

12 Things you may not have known about Comet ISON

Xnewsman has sent in a great article that lists some fun facts that you may not have known about the Comet ISON, Like:

1)  This is the first trip to the inner solar system for ISON and its last.  Its orbit will swing it around the sun and back towards deep-space, with enough energy to exit the solar system all together.

2)  ISON's orbit inbound will take it a mere 700 thousand miles above the surface of the sun!

And other fun fact!  Take a trip over to Slate.com for the remainder of this article.   It really is a fun read. 

Predawn Excitement for November!

Carole just sent in an article from National Geographic - Star Struck - with some fun stuff to look for in November. 

From the NG article:

• On Friday, November 1, and for the rest of the month, the much-talked-about comet ISON will be visible in the predawn sky. At the beginning of the month ISON shines at about 9th magnitude making it visible as a faint fuzzy speck in binoculars. Expectations are that it will continue to brighten, possibly reaching naked-eye visibility by the end of the month when it reaches its closest approach with the sun on November 28.
• Joining ISON just a few binocular fields to its far lower left is another icy interloper, the comet 2P/Encke, which will also be visible a couple hours before local sunrise. Flying through the constellation Leo, the Lion, Encke shines at about 7th magnitude, making it the brightest comet in our skies for now. For sky-watchers this means that Encke is an easy target to see with binoculars and small telescopes. The two comets appear about 20 degrees apart—equal to the width of two side-by-side fists at arm’s length.

Please check out the complete National Geographic article for the complete lowdown. 

Readying For Comet ISON

 Out in deep space some 6 billion miles from the sun lies an area containing billions of icy bodies.   Every so often one of theses bodies falls out of this area and hurtles sunward. 

In September of 2012 just such an object was discovered by  Artyom Novichonok and Vitali Nevski using a 40 cm-diameter telescope.  Designated comet ISON its  path  will bring it within over 6 hundred thousand miles above the Sun’s  surface on 28 November of 2013.

Both ESA and NASA have  missions that are now planning to observe ISON.  ESA’s Mars Express will be taking photos and analyzing the composition of the comet’s coma for a two week period.   

SOHO, a  joint ESA/NASA mission will observe the comet as it swings around the Sun in November,  to see if the comet survives its close encounter with the sun.

ESA’s Venus Express and Proba-2 will also target ISON during November and December.

December 26 is the best time to observe the comet during its' closest pass to Earth.  Its brightness will be very much reduced however as its close encounter will have burned off substantial amounts of ice and other gasses

Hey have you seen comet Pan-STARRS yet?   It is visible here in the Northern hemisphere at twilight in the southwest sky, and should be until the end of the month. 

Photographer Dan Finnerty took a series of still photos, in Altadena California, of the comet in the evening sky setting beside the moon.  The series is really spectacular!  Here is the Vimeo short film of the photos set in time lapse mode.
Comet Pan-Starrs Moonset from Dan Finnerty on Vimeo.

If it fails to play here, click the vimeo at the bottom of the video.

First Time Photograph of Comet Hitting the Sun

Tim Sayell sends in this great link from Yahoo News detailing the first time ever photograph of a comet striking the sun!

The picture was taken July 6 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a satellite launched on February 11, 2010 who's mission is to observe the Sun for over five years.

From the article:

• One of the SDO spacecraft's high-definition imagers "actually spotted a sun-grazing comet as it disintegrated over about a 15 minute period, something never observed before.....
• The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint NASA-European Space Agency spacecraft, also spotted the comet's demise and recorded a video of the event.

Read the full article here

Comet Elenin Due for a Close Call With Earth

Comet Elenin is due to make it's closest approach later this year when it will pass within 22 million miles of Earth. Elenin will make it's closest approach to the Sun on 10 September 2011. On the 16 of October 2011, the comet will pass within 21,000,000 miles of the Earth.
From the Wiki:

• The discoverer, Leonid Elenin, estimates that the comet nucleus is apx. 2.5 miles in diameter. As of April 2011, the comet is around magnitude 15 (roughly the brightness of Pluto), and the coma of the comet is estimated to be about 50,000 miles in diameter.

The graphic shows the path of the comet through the inner solar system.

Science daily article

Deep Impact Still Making History / UPDATE!!!

For only the fifth time in the history of the space program, a spacecraft will fly close enough to image a comet. The probe Deep Impact first made history when it launched an 800 pound impactor into the comet Tempel 1, July fourth of 2005 totally changing what we thought we knew about the makeup of the comet.

That impact was supposed to be the end of the spectacularly successful 300 million dollar mission. However NASA gave mission controllers permission to go for another close encounter with a comet and JPL decided that a comet discovered 24 years ago was a good candidate. This comet was Hartley2 discovered by Malcom Hartley using the Schmidt Telescope in Australia.

At 7:00am on Thursday November fourth, Deep Impact Extended investigation ( DIXI) will approach the comet within apx 400 miles, taking pictures along the way.

NASA's Goddard Space Center article Wiki Deep Inpact and DIXI mission

And here are some spectacular photos from Comet Hartley 2

Ten Things You Don’t Know About Comets

From Discover's Bad Astronomy blog is a list of 10 things you may or may not know about comets.

1) The actual solid part of a comet is tiny. The actual solid part of a comet is tiny.

2) Comets are dirty snowballs. In general, comet nuclei are mountain-size dirty snowballs: rock, dust, gravel and other bits of stuff all mixed up with frozen gases and of course lots and lots of water.

3) Comets spend most of their lives looking pretty much like asteroids. They tend to have long, elliptical orbits. The farther they are from the Sun, the slower they travel, so really they might spend 99.9% of their lives far, far from the heat of our nearest star in temps so cold that even water freezes harder than rock.

4) Every time a comet comes near the Sun, it dies a little bit. Some comets are held together by the frozen gases. As one of these passes the Sun, that gas blows away, and the comet loses some of its structural integrity. Eventually, if it’s mostly gas, it’ll disintegrate.

5) Comets can have two tails. In fact they can have lots of tails. The dust tail can be broken up into several straight features called dust striae, possibly due to large pieces of the comet breaking off and forming their own tails.

6) Comets spawn meteor showers. Millions of tons of material blowing off a comet every time it passes the Sun. If a comet’s orbit intersects the Earth
the Earth can plow through this debris which burns up in our atmosphere, and we get a meteor shower.

7) Comets are potentially more dangerous than asteroids. They can come from deep, deep space, falling all the way from beyond Neptune’s orbit. They pick up a lot of velocity, and some can be moving at 70 km/sec (40 miles/sec) this speed makes them pound for pound 10 times more energetic than asteroids.

8) Seven comets have been visited by spacecraft. So far.

9) The best comet hunter of all time is SOHO. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

10) Some comets can be seen in daylight. If a comet gets close enough to the Earth, or close to the Sun at the right angle, it can become bright enough to be seen even during the day.

Of course the article has LOTS more data than I put here. Click the article title to go to the complete Discover entry

Beautiful shot of Halley's Comet nucleus

The blog "The Daily Galaxy" posted this stunning picture from the ESA's Giotto spacecraft of the nucleus of Halley's Comet when it made a flyby in 1986.

For those of you that had a chance to see this year's Orionid meteor shower, you should know that those bright little bits are in fact the material from comet Halley from it's last pass through the Solar System. It's next appearance comes in 2061 as it makes it's 75 year round trip of Sol.

I can't help but be awed by the scope. Here we are steaming a round our local star which is speeding hellbent through our own local neighborhood and all this grandeur is pulled along for the ride! I know a lot of the mystique comes from being hardly smarter than a bag of hammers, but who can not squeeze out an "oh wow!" during the shower, knowing that we are plowing through the leavings from the creation of the solar system.

Anyone feeling small?

ESA - Rosetta Nears Asteroid Fly-by

Overshadowed by more glamorous missions to Venus, Mars, Saturn, etc., the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta mission approaches a scientifically interesting fly-by of asteroid 2867 Steins. The closest approach will occur on September fifth.

ESA just released this tracking image from Rosetta which shows Stein's relative movement.

"Rosetta spacecraft will be the first to undertake the long-term exploration of a comet at close quarters ... entering orbit around Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, the spacecraft will release a small lander onto the icy nucleus, then spend the next two years orbiting the comet as it heads towards the Sun"

This asteroid fly-by is just a cool bonus to Rosetta's main mission but is interesting nonetheless. (Now if I could just get that darn Alice Cooper song out of my head).

More information on this fly-by and Rosetta in general is available at its homepage linked below.

<ESA Rosetta Homepage>

Astronomers Find Very Unusual Solar System Minor Planet

Over two billion miles from Earth, inside the orbit of the planet Neptune, a lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey to the inner system. Of course "inner system" as it applies to 2006 SQ372, is a relative thing. At it's closest approach to the sun it will be 150 billion miles out, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. So many things are unusual about SQ372. The major planets in the solar system have circular orbits. However SQ372's orbit is four times longer than it is wide. The only known object with a comparable orbit is Sedna -- a Pluto-like dwarf planet. But 2006 SQ372's orbit takes it more than one-and-a-half times further from the Sun, and its orbital period is nearly twice as long. SQ372 is also small, 30-60 miles, making it for all intents a comet, thought one that never gets close enough to develop a tail. That SQ372 is here at all is causing some head scratching. Comets come from the Ortt cloud which contains objects ejected from the inner system. The Ortt objects resides in orbits around the Sun at distances of several trillion miles. However even at its most distant turning point, SQ372 will be ten times closer to the Sun than the main body of the Oort Cloud. Some astronomers have suggested an "inner" Ortt cloud, suggesting that Sedna might also belong to that group. One thing seems to be coming to light though. There are likely many more of these smaller icy bodies in the solar system that will be uncovered by the next series of scans with greater sensitivity and covering a wider area.

Exploding Asteroid May Have Killed Off Mammoth & Humans!

13 thousand years ago may have been a very bad time for North American Mammoth and early human inhabitants of the north American continent. Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana recently is strengthening the case suggesting that a phase of extinction for animals and humans at the end of the last Ice Age was a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada. The theory puts forth that an object exploded just above the earth’s surface over Canada, producing a massive shock wave and a super-heated wave that set large parts of the northern hemisphere ablaze. Some of the most telling evidence is samples of diamonds, gold and silver found in sites in Ohio and Indiana are from deposits in Canada. The only plausible scenario for explaining their presence this far south- researches say - is this type of cataclysmic explosive event.

<more in ScienceDaily>

Incredible Comet Bigger than the Sun

The Nov. 1 photo at left, by an amateur astronomer, shows Comet Holmes' coma consists of concentric shells of dust and a faint tail. The Hubble image at right, made Nov. 4 and enhanced to reveal details, reveals the bow-tie appearance created by twice as much dust existing along the horizontal direction. Credit: NASA,ESA, and H. Weaver (The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory); Alan Dyer

Thanks to Cathy for the post

Comet draws scientific, amateur interest

A comet that has unexpectedly brightened in the past couple of weeks and now is visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest. The comet in question and of interest is Comet 17P/Holmes which can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper. The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies. Until Oct. 23, the comet had been visible to modern astronomers only with a telescope when it suddenly increased in brightness which indicated that the comet nucleus had disintegrated. Scientists speculate the comet has exploded because there are sinkholes in its nucleus, giving it a honeycomb-like structure. The collapse exposed comet ice to the sun, which transformed the ice into gas. Paul Lewis, director of astronomy outreach at the University of Tennessee, says that "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event to witness, along the lines of when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter back in 1994,"

Thanks to listener Cathy for the post

Jupiter increases risk of comet strike on Earth

Contrary to prevailing wisdom, Jupiter does not protect Earth from comet strikes. In fact, Earth would suffer fewer impacts without the influence of Jupiter's gravity.

A 1994 study showed that replacing Jupiter with a much smaller planet like Uranus or Neptune would lead to 1000 times as many long-period comets hitting Earth. This led to speculation that complex life would have a hard time developing in solar systems without a Jupiter-like planet because of more intense bombardment by comets.

But a new study shows that if there were no planet at all in Jupiter's orbit, Earth would actually be safer from impacts.

The contradictory results arise because Jupiter affects comets in two different, competing ways. Its gravity helps pull comets into the inner solar system, where they have a chance of hitting Earth, but can also clear away Earth-threatening comets by ejecting them from the solar system altogether, via a gravitational slingshot effect.

Thanks to Shaun for the post