Comet Siding Spring will fly to Mars this Sunday

Comet Siding Spring will fly to Mars this Sunday

On Sunday, an event will occur that happens once every million years. Comet Siding Spring will make the hearts pause as it passes alongside Mars, providing our armada of Mars robots-researchers with a tremendous sight.

Comet C / 2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered on January 3, 2013 by Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia and initially, astronomers assumed that an ice block of ice and stone could strike Mars. But after more accurate calculations were obtained, astronomers realized that it would take place “in the balance” by cosmic standards from the Red Planet.

If the comet really hit Mars, the NASA Curiosity and Opportunity rovers would be in potential danger, but they might have seen the historical planetary impact. But instead, they prepare only for an accidental cometary effect. At the moment, all the space agencies in the world are preparing for historical observation when comet Siding Spring comes close to the Red Planet only 87,000 miles away.

Currently, there are 7 missions in orbit or on the surface of Mars: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Odyssey and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN), the European Space Agency’s Mars Express (MEX) and Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) orbiting Mars. Rovers Curiosity and Opportunity - on the surface. For months, science teams prepared missions for this intimate encounter. For example, when calculating the comet's trajectory, NASA modified the orbits of three satellites so that they were protected from the effects of comet's high-speed particles that could pose a threat.

"The danger is not the nucleus of a comet, but the trail of debris being chased after it," said Rich Zurek, chief researcher for the Mars research program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The simulation results show that the danger is not as great as originally thought. Mars will be right on the edge of the debris cloud, so it may collide with some particles, or maybe not."

According to a press release from the European Space Agency dated October 17, Mars Express will operate normally, as a more accurate analysis of cometary activity minimized the potential danger of hardware damage.

"We have developed a special mode for Mars Express that will minimize any risk of cometary particles being hit," says scientist Michel Denis from NASA's Mars Research Program. "It includes turning off all instruments and non-essential on-board systems and turning the ship so that the high gain antenna will act as a shield."

It is believed that this will be the first appearance of the comet Siding Spring in the inner part of the solar system. Coming to us from the Oort Cloud (a hypothetical envelope surrounding our solar system at a distance of one light year, which is full of ice and stone from the formation of our sun and planets), for the first time a comet approaches close to the sun. And so it happened that the comet will fly next to the second largest planet in the Solar System, although it is inhabited only by robots. "We cannot reach the comets of the Oort Cloud with the help of existing technologies. ... So we were lucky that it was the comet that would fly to us," said astrophysicist Cary Liss from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "Just imagine that this comet began its movement at the dawn of mankind and will fly to us just now," added Liss. "And now we can observe it with the help of our satellites and rovers."

Our insatiable desire to explore comets is motivated by our need to understand where we come from. These ancient ice bodies contain not only information about the chemicals that served as the material for the formation of the Sun and the planets, they also play a key role in the origin of life. The prebiological compounds stored in comets and the conditions in which they were formed represent the time capsule in which the deep past of our solar system is imprinted. And it just so happened that space will present us with this time capsule, formed 5 billion years ago, which will be opened by our spacecraft this Sunday.

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