Hubble image archive

Hubble Tracks Inbound Comet

Date: Jan 1, 2014
Mission: Hubble Space Telescope
Archive ID: hubblesite-images-2014-19-3344-image

By Kakha Giorgashvili January 1, 2014

This is a series of Hubble Space Telescope pictures of comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring as observed on Oct. 29, 2013; Jan. 21, 2014; and March 11, 2014. The distances from Earth were, respectively, 376 million miles, 343 million miles, and 353 million miles. The solid icy nucleus is too small to be resolved by Hubble, but it lies at the center of a dusty coma that is roughly 12,000 miles across in these images.

When the glow of the coma is subtracted through image processing, which incorporates a smooth model of the coma's light distribution, Hubble resolves what appear to be two jets of dust coming off the nucleus in opposite directions. The jets have persisted through the three Hubble visits, with their directions in the sky nearly unchanged. These visible-light images were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.

Credits

NASA, ESA, and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

Image Details

About The Object
Object Name	C/2013 A1 Siding Spring
Object Description	Comet
Distance	At the time of the Hubble observation on March 11, 2014, the comet was 3.28 astronomical units (305 million miles) from the Sun. The comet was 3.79 astronomical units (353 million miles) from Earth.
About The Data
Data Description	The image was created from Hubble data from proposal : J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute), M. Kelley (University of Maryland), N. Samarasinha (Planetary Science Institute), C. Lisse (JHU/APL), T. Farnham and M. A'Hearn (University of Maryland), W. Delamere (Delamere Support Services), and M. Mutchler (STScI).
Instrument	HST>WFC3/UVIS
Exposure Dates	Oct. 29, 2013; Jan. 21, 2014; and March 11, 2014
Filters	F606W (V)