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!

Is It Aiming for US?

Take a look at this animation (provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Science Visualization lab).  It shows the path of the incoming comet around the Sun, beginning right about now and continuing into next year. As you watch, you’ll see that it is right on path to go around the Sun and that it really doesn’t get very close to Earth. It’ll be close enough that we’ll see it as a nice elongated patch of light in the sky before perihelion on the 28th of November and then again in the second week of December right after it goes around the Sun. Comet ISON will come closest to Earth in January 2014, but as you can see from the video, it will be well above the plane of the planets, and thus proves no danger to our planet. Or us. There’s not much it can do (being a little chunk of ice and rock) at a distance of some 63 MILLION kilometers.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is there’s a good chance you’ll be able to see this comet if it continues to brighten up. Its plasma and dust tails are forming nicely, so now we just have to wait to see how it survives its close approach to the Sun. Some scientists suspect it could be pulled apart as it rounds the Sun. That’s entirely possible since comets are really just dirty iceballs and strong gravitation and heat are their worst enemies. Heat, as should be obvious, will melt the ices on the comet, which can also destabilize the nucleus, making it more susceptible to breaking up under the influence of the Sun’s strong gravity.

The other reason I’m sharing this is because there are still people out there who are so desperate for some kind of catastrophe (No, in this case I’m not talking about certain right-wing politicians) that they’ve made up some incredible and frankly pretty crazy stories about what they think this comet REALLY is. None of it is, of course, scientific or based on actual facts. However, the Comet ISON nutters (or, as one of my British friends on Facebook calls them: Numpties) have hysteria on their side, pseudoscience, and a lot of screeching points—er, I mean talking points—to explain how there is a spacecraft hidden behind the planet, how it’s going to hit our planet, or that it’s going to cause earthquakes, floods, plagues, etc. You name it, these pseudoscientists will traffic in any kind of information that makes no sense and invoke a comet as the cause.  I think they’re really hung up on this whole idea of a comet with its own spacecraft. And hey, who wouldn’t like one of those to take long drives in?  Alas for the numpties, It turns out those spacecraft turned out to be entirely explainable lens effects in the camera used to take the images. These guys know that, now, but they still seize on those spots in the image as proof!  proof! I tell you!  that there’s something ooky and weird about Comet ISON. I don’t know about you, but I think the ooky and weird is definitely in high supply here on Earth, not on ISON.

Now think about this. Isn’t this whole pseudo-science circus about Comet ISON giving you a strong sense of deja vu? Every time a comet comes around, the same nutjobs get out there and start nattering away about how it’s going to kill us, pepper the planet with deadly gas “particles”, set off volcanoes, hit the planet, take off with the women and babies, and who knows what else excites their feverish imaginations. And yet, we’ve had dozens and even hundreds of comets go by and there’s been no increase in the nearly 3,000 quakes the Earth has every day. Volcanos erupt whenever and wherever they please, and no tiny little ice hunk is going to tell THEM what to do. And, the wimmenfolk are still here (some of us are busy writing about real science, not nutjobbery).  In short, despite the fact that all these comets have been by, NOT ONE of these nutjob predictions has ever come true. Ever.

So, next time you read or hear nonsense about how the comet is gonna “git us”, take it for what it’s worth (nothing).  And, get out there and observe Comet ISON, once it’s bright enough to see. Comets are cool to watch. Check out the observing pages on Sky&Telescope and Astronomy magazines for the latest info on where and when to look.

Want to see another version of that orbit video that you can use to help you understand how Comet ISONs path goes?  Glad to oblige. It’s right here. Its viewpoint is as if you were in a T-38 chase plane riding a few tens of thousands of kilometers alongside the comet.