HiRISE Spots Comet ISON

They’re not much, but here are the first-ever images of a comet taken from Mars. Well, from Mars orbit, to be precise.

They were made on September 29, 2013, using data sent back from the HiRISE Camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is circling Mars on a mapping and imaging mission. The comet is just crossing the orbit of Mars and some observers are reporting a plasma tail growing (which happens for many comets).

Planetary scientists are still analyzing these images, but it’s easy for a layperson to see that Comet ISON is still fairly dim. While the image quality isn’t great as a result, what is shown here is enough to let the planetary science folks start working on figuring out how big the nucleus is. As the comet gets closer to the sun, its brightness will increase, and it may also become brighter as the stronger sunlight volatilizes the comet’s ices.

Comet ISON (officially known as C/2012 S1) may well be on its first pass through the inner solar system. It formed in the Oort Cloud, which begins outside the orbit of Neptune and stretches out for nearly a light-year away from the Sun.  The next big milestone for the comet will be perihelion, which occurs on the 29th of November.  Observers might be able to see it just before perihelion, but as I mentioned in my previous entry, if it survives its near-Sun passage, then it will be a fine sight in the skies starting around the 10th of December. For now, you actually need a telescope to view ISON, which is visible in the early morning hours.  For comet-finding charts, check out Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazines in the U.S., SkyNews in Canada, Astronomy Now in England, Ciel et Espace in France, Nuovo Orione in Italy, and Sterne und Weltraum in Germany. There are also many useful web sites beyond these to give you updates on the ISON.

Mission Delayed by Shutdown: Ya Canna Shut Down the Laws o’ Physics, Congress!

In other news about Mars, I was sad (and sort of mad) to see that the MAVEN mission to Mars is now threatened by the totally unnecessary government shutdown here in the U.S. This is an incredibly creative and much-needed mission to study the Mars atmosphere, and there’s NO reason why some politicians are gleeful about wasting the mission while they preach about how they want to clean up government “waste”.  (Well, we all know that isn’t really the reason they’re having a tantrum, but that’s a topic for a political blog.)

Anyway, you can’t just launch to Mars anytime you want. You have to wait until the proper line-up of planetary orbits occurs so that you can send your mission on the shortest route. Those conditions are set by the laws of physics and orbital mechanics. What this means is, if the spacecraft doesn’t launch on time, it will have to wait until 2016. Here’s hoping that this impasse that the House of Representatives foisted on themselves will be fixed soon, because natural laws don’t care about a politician’s hissy fit. If you launch late, you lose. And you lose something infinitely more valuable than a politician’s inflated self-importance. You lose knowledge. You lose prestige. You lose a chance to do something to advance our science and knowledge.

A great many of these politicians do not understand or care about science, but through their childish antics, they ARE wasting money with their hissy-fit-caused shutdown of our government, which also extends to NASA and its contractors. This is in addition to wasting the time and efforts of thousands of dedicated people who just want their mission to get to Mars and return the data.

Stay tuned and let’s hope that MAVEN gets going on her trip to Mars soon!