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.
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance.…
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated…
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to…
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too…
It’s difficult to actually visualise a universe that is changing. Things tend to happen at…
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns…