[meteorite-list] Hubble Catches Views of a Jet Rotating with Comet 252P/LINEAR

[Ron Baalke]

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/14

Hubble Catches Views of a Jet Rotating with Comet 252P/LINEAR
News Release Number: STScI-2016-14
May 12, 2016

[Images]
 
For thousands of years, humans have recorded sightings of mysterious comets 
sweeping across the nighttime skies. These celestial wanderers, "snowballs" 
of dust and ice, are swift-moving visitors from the cold depths of space. 
Some of them periodically visit the inner solar system during their journeys 
around the sun.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Comet 
252P/LINEAR just after it swept by Earth on March 21. The visit was one 
of the closest encounters between a comet and our planet. The comet traveled 
within 3.3 million miles of Earth, or about 14 times the distance between 
our planet and the moon. The images reveal a narrow, well-defined jet 
of dust ejected by the comet's icy, fragile nucleus. These observations 
also represent the closest celestial object Hubble has observed, other 
than the moon. The comet will return to the inner solar system again in 
2021.