Aurora, Orbital Sunrise & Comet C/2023 A3 | International Space Station

Aurora, Orbital Sunrise & Comet C/2023 A3 | International Space Station

NASA Astronaut Matthew Dominick: "Comet rises up over the horizon just before orbital sunrise with aurora streaking by." 

Technical details: 50mm, 1.2, 1/4s, ISO 6400

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the solar system's Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory east of Nanjing, China, on January 9, 2023, and independently found by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa on February 22, 2023. ATLAS is funded by NASA's planetary defense office, and developed and operated by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. C/2023 A3 passed perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million miles) on September 27, 2024.

The Oort cloud is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.

Expedition 72 Updates:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/

Expedition 72 Crew

Station Commander: Suni Williams

Roscosmos (Russia): Alexander Grebenkin, Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner 

NASA: Matthew Dominick, Mike Barrett, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore, Don Pettit

Image Credit: NASA's Johnson Space Center/M. Dominick

Release Date: Sept. 29, 2024

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