Siding Spring tagged posts

Hubble image of Comet Siding Spring before and after filtering, as captured by Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

When Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) passed just 140,000 kilometres from Mars on 19th October 2014, depositing a large amount of debris in the martian atmosphere, space agencies coordinated multiple spacecraft to witness the largest meteor shower in recorded history. It was a rare opportunity, as this kind of planetary event occurs only once every 100,000 years...