Image credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO/Joy Ng.ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, saw a bright comet plunge toward the Sun on 3-4 August 2016, at nearly 1.3 million miles per hour. Comets are chunks of ice and dust that orbit the Sun, usually on highly elliptical orbits that carry them far beyond the orbit of Pluto at their farthest points. This comet, first spotted by SOHO on 1 August, is part of the Kreutz family of comets, a group with related orbits that broke off of a huge comet several centuries ago.
This comet didn’t fall into the Sun, but rather whipped around it – or at least, it would have if it had survived its journey. Like most sungrazing comets, this comet was torn apart and vaporised by the intense forces near the Sun.
The disc of the Sun is represented by the white circle in this looping animation.
Ground controllers are analyzing a fault aboard Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft after an encounter with comet dust confused the probe’s navigation system, leaving the robot explorer in a temporary safe mode and halting regular science operations.
The sharp-eyed science camera on Europe’s Rosetta comet orbiter caught a view of the probe’s fuzzy shadow when controllers guided the spacecraft just a few miles over its subject’s nucleus last month.
Mission controllers are rethinking a series of close-up comet flybys planned for Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft after a haze of dust around the comet’s central nucleus led to navigation errors during a close encounter in late March.
