Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS & NASA's Europa Clipper on SpaceX Falcon Heavy

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS & NASA's Europa Clipper on SpaceX Falcon Heavy

NASA's Europa Clipper is now headed toward this ocean world around Jupiter. The large spacecraft is tucked into the payload fairing atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in this photo taken at Kennedy Space Center in Florida the day before the mission's successful October 14, 2024, launch. 

Europa Clipper's interplanetary voyage will first take it to Mars, then back to Earth, and then on to Jupiter on gravity assist trajectories that will allow it to enter orbit around Jupiter in April 2030. Once orbiting Jupiter, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times, exploring a Jovian moon with a global subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. 

Posing in the background next to the floodlit rocket is Comet Tsuchinsan-ATLAS, about a day after the comet's closest approach to Earth. A current darling of evening skies, the naked-eye comet is a visitor from the distant Oort cloud.

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.

Learn more about NASA's Europa Clipper Mission:

https://europa.nasa.gov/

Image Credit & Copyright: Ben Cooper

Ben's website: http://www.launchphotography.com

Caption Credit: NASA

Image Date: Oct. 13, 2024

Release Date: Oct. 17, 2024

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