The comet Siding Spring created an astounding show on Mars also threatened NASA’s spaceship revolving around the planet.
According to the CBS News Report, “Because of technological restrictions, NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers were not able to capture the light show triggered by Siding Spring’s close fly-by of Mars recently after it left a lot of primordial dust around the atmosphere of the red-colored planet. However, the dust posed a significant threat towards the spaceship that orbit the earth.”
Even though the comet didn’t pose a significant risk to revolving spaceship, NASA contrived these to the far side of the planet throughout the approach of the comet – which churned out to be smart, as comet dust peppered top of the atmosphere where the spaceship reside.
Also called Comet C/2013 A1, Siding Spring originated from the Oort Cloud, several comets which were remained from the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years back that stretches from Pluto to around midway towards the adjacent star. It was the comet’s first trip to the inner solar system. It began making its way here millions of years back once the gravity of some celestial body sent it on the different route. Experts said that it was a rare event that occurs once every 8 million years.
Presently, you will find three NASA orbiters that monitor Mars: the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Odyssey, and MAVEN, which lately showed up. There’s even the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, that are outfitted the cameras and calculating instruments to understand more about the Earth’s neighboring planet.
MAVEN is short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, also it is built to read the atmosphere of the planet having its Imagine Ultraviolet Spectrograph to identify alterations in the dust. It could identify eight ionized metals in the comet: sodium, magnesium, potassium, chromium, manganese, iron, nickel, and zinc.
