The Hubble Space Telescope is known for its awe-inspiring images, and it has one more for us to start our out-of-this-world weekends off right.
The Comet Siding Spring flew past Mars, and the Hubble Space Telescope was there to capture the scene. Although it doesn't sound like much, the comet was within 87,000 miles of the planet when it soared near Mars. They were both 149 million miles from Earth at that time. The below composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the positions of Comet Siding Spring and Mars at around 2:28 p.m. EDT on Oct. 19.
Pretty sweet, huh? You can also find a wicked cool composite of two different images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over at The Christian Science Monitor, which shows part of the spacecraft Rosetta in front of the comet.
Scientists are expecting the close proximity of the comet to Rosetta will give them their best look at the Oort Cloud so far. The Oort Cloud is a spherical region of icy masses that are thought to be from the formation of the solar system.
It feels weird to use a composite image as evidence of something, doesn't it? However, that's just the way it has to be done when taking photos of these celestial objects. Mars is 10,000 times brighter than the comet, so you wouldn't be able to use the same exposure on both or else you wouldn't be able to see one of them very well. There's also the fact that the objects were moving, so the exposure would have also blurred them.
In case you really want to know what the deal is with the Comet Siding Spring, scientists also recently made a rather smelly discovery. Apparently, the comet smells pretty nasty.
"It stinks," Kathrin Altwegg, a researcher who operated the instrument ROSINA, which detected the odor, told NPR. ""It's quite a smelly mixture."
The "perfume" contains such distinct scents as ammonia, methane and sulfur dioxide. Britney Spears should bottle that up and market it as her next fragrance, don't you think? "Siding Spring by Britney Spears." And just in time for the holidays, too.
Rosetta is set to release its Philae lander on Nov. 12, so who knows what other smells, I mean, sights it will comes across then.
