This illustration shows NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft flying by the Hartley 2 comet. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / UMD)
Comet Flyby
Spacecraft comes closer to a moving comet than ever before
TOP: Hartley 2, up close.
BOTTOM: From Earth, comets are seen with long tails of light.
(NASA / JPL-Caltech / UMD)
Many people think of comets as shooting stars that speed through the sky with a huge, glowing tail. But scientists were surprised to discover recently that sometimes a comet can look a lot like a giant peanut.
On Thursday, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft passed by the comet Hartley 2, which was zipping through outer space at 27,500 miles per hour. The photos that the spacecraft took were the closest images ever taken of a comet. Up close, the comet looked like a glowing peanut.
Hartley 2 was only 435 miles away when Deep Impact's cameras started taking snapshots. That's about the distance from Washington, D.C., to Boston.
At NASA's jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, California, scientists cheered when they received the first photos taken by Deep Impact. They say the photos will provide new information about comets.
"The images are full of great cometary data, and that's what we hoped for," said Michael A'Heam, the mission's principal investigator. "Early observations of the comet show that, for the first time, we may be able to connect activity to individual features on the nucleus."
The nucleus, or core of the comet, is the peanut-shaped section of Hartley 2 that was photographed. A comet's nucleus is a cold, solid mass made of rock, space dust, and frozen gases, so people often refer to it as a dirty snowball.
Why doesn't this comet look familiar? When we look at comets from Earth, we see them with glowing tails called coma. That's because our sun lights up all the particles that trail behind a comet when it gets close. Hartley 2 is 23 million miles away from Earth—way outside the solar system. So when we see it photographed from only a few hundred miles away, it looks different from what we expect a comet to look like.
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