Comet Siding Spring shines in ultraviolet in this image obtained by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft. Credit: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/University of Colorado; NASA
As Comet Siding Spring passed close by Mars on Sunday (Oct. 19), NASA’s newest Mars spacecraft took a time-out from its commissioning to grab some ultraviolet pictures of its coma. What you see above is hydrogen, a whole lot of it, leaving the comet in this picture taken from 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers).
The hydrogen is a product of the water ice on the comet that the Sun is slowly melting and breaking apart into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Because hydrogen scatters ultraviolet light from the Sun, it shows up rather clearly in this picture taken by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft.
Check out more recent pictures of Siding Spring below.
What a wonderful arguably simple solution. Here’s the problem, we travel to Mars but how…
One of the main scientific objectives of next-generation observatories (like the James Webb Space Telescope)…
In the coming decades, NASA and China intend to send the first crewed missions to…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just increased the number of known distant supernovae…
The supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy is a quiet…
Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We're in no position to…