NASA astronaut aboard International Space Station shares images of comet NEOWISE

NASA astronauts aboard International Space Station captured a spectacular image of the newly discovered comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE, the third and the only comet discovered in the year 2020 to travel closer to the Earth after a perihelion. On July 4, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken said that the team has set the camera at ISS to automatically take shots every few seconds during their spacewalk. And therefore, the device managed to capture the new bright comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) which was first sighted by a space telescope on March 27 at more than 138 million miles from Earth. 

Earlier this month, the retrograde comet with a near-parabolic orbit was detected on NASA’s infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope called NEOWISE (short for Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer). Located at 194 million miles (312 million kilometers) from the sun then, and shining at the magnitude of +17 — about 25,000 times fainter than the faintest star according to astronomers, the comet was a challenge to watch except only via large professional telescopes. However, as per reports by NASA, on July 3, on its way to approach the sun at 27.3 million miles away (44 million km) and despite the temperatures of up to 1,100 degrees the comet survived and emerged as one of the brightest to be visible from the naked human eye. 

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Two other comets ATLAS and SWAN faded

On July 5, an Astrophotographer Chris Schur spotted Comet NEOWISE early July 5 from Payson Arizona as he updated the images on the website. Comet Neowise was the first in 2020 to survive after two other comets ATLAS and SWAN faded as they reached the vicinity of the sun disappointing the astronomers, according to reports. Before its arrival, an Australian comet observer, Michael Mattiazzo suggested that NEOWISE had at least a 70% chance to survive its close encounter with the sun as compared to the previous comets, as per his statement on Space Journal. The comet was first detected during NASA's NEOWISE mission that launched in December 2009.

NEOWISE mission’s aim was to identify unknown objects that include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of Earth's path around the sun—NASA

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(All Images Credit: NASA/Space Journal)