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halley’s comet

Debunking Comet ISON Conspiracy Theories (No, ISON is Not Nibiru)

April 29, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Comets always seem to bring ‘em out of the wood work. There’s a scene from the 1998 movie Deep Impact where the president, played by Morgan Freeman, reveals a terrible truth… the U.S. government has known for over a year that [...]

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Was the Repeating Passage of Halley’s Comet Known of in Ancient Times?

April 6, 2013

An interesting and largely unknown tale of ancient astronomy recently came our way while reading author and astrophysicist Mario Livio’s blog. The story involves the passage of the most famous of all comets.   Remove this ad

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How the Space Shuttle Killed an American Halley’s Comet Mission

March 13, 2013

NASA missed the chance to visit Halley’s Comet in 1986 when the famed sentinel swung close to Earth, as it does every 76 years. Luckily for history, the Europeans flew Giotto past it on this day (March 13) in 1986, and some other nations sent their own probes. The full story of NASA’s withdrawal is [...]

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3 Comets That Fizzled

February 27, 2013

Take a dirty snowball in space and hurl it towards the Sun. I dare you… and then make a prediction as to how that will look. This is the problem comet scientists face when talking about how bright a comet will appear from Earth. They’re imaging a conglomerate of dust, ice and other materials millions [...]

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Giotto

January 3, 2011

Giotto was a European robotic spacecraft mission from the European Space Agency. It was ESA’s first deep-space mission, designed to study comets. In 1986, it passed closest to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet. Its images showed for the first time the shape of a comet’s nucleus and found the first evidence of organic material in [...]

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