Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) | International Space Station

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) | International Space Station

NASA Astronaut Matthew Dominick: "The comet tail is noticeably longer each day. Pause the video at about 15 seconds . . . you can see the tail of the comet looks like it is bending. The atmosphere is more dense the closer you get to earth. Changes in the density of the atmosphere change the refractive index and thus make the comet tail appear bent."

"I was in my crew quarters reviewing the imagery when I first saw the bend in the comet’s tail. I did not see it real time when taking the images. I yelled out the door to to check it out but he was already off to take more images of the comet with an IR camera . . . look forward to those."

"Video is a timelapse played at 8 frames per second. Images were taken with a 1/8 sec exposure with about 5ms in between shots so this timelapse should be about the same speed as we see it out the window."

"Canadarm2 is in the near field, upper left, and out of focus." 

Technical details: 200mm, 1/8s, ISO 5000

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 will pass perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million miles) on September 27, 2024. This is when it can be best viewed with the naked eye from the ground on Earth.

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

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

Duration: 1 minute

Release Date: Sept. 25, 2024

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