“All day she had been dreaming of the comet, its wild and fiery beauty, what it might mean, how her life might change.”
-Kim Edwards
A comet is an icy body, that when passing close to the Sun, heats up and initiates to release gases. The process is known as outgassing. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe also abbreviated as PSP is a robotic spacecraft which was launched in August 2018 with a mission to observe the outer corona of the Sun. It has captured a unique sight of Comet Neowise on July 5, 2020. Comet Neowise is a retrograde comet with a parabolic orbit identified on March 27, 2020, by the Neowise space telescope. The comet is low in the morning sky just above the northeastern horizon and below Capella, close to the blaze of twilight. It can be clearly seen with the unaided eye.
The comet is expected to remain visible to the unaided eye throughout July 2020. The comet is also known as comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE and nicknamed comet NEOWISE. Parker captured an unrivalled view of the comet’s twin tails when it was particularly active just after its closest approach to the Sun, called perihelion. Comet Neowise is thought to form either in the Kuiper belt, beyond Neptune’s orbit, or in the Oort Cloud, billions of kilometres beyond the Kuiper belt in a theorised sphere surrounding the plane of the solar system.
WISPR which is the abbreviated form of Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe and developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory is the imaging instrument of the PSP mission to the Sun. This has been processed to increase contrast and remove excess brightness from scattered sunlight, revealing more detail in the comet tails.
Out of the twin trails, the lower trail appears broad and fuzzy. It is the dust tail of the comet that is generated when dust lifts off the surface of the comet’s nucleus and trails behind the comet in its orbit. Wherein the upper tail of the comet is made from gases- ionized by losing electrons in the Sun’s intense light. The solar wind buffets these ionized gases and generates the ion tail that extends directly away from the Sun.
References: NASA
How to See Comet NEOWISE– Tips From NASA
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