May 2, 2011 - Breaking up is Easy to Do

Published in cooperation with The Planetary Society

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May 14, 2012 - Monkey Nebula

May 7, 2012 - Getting a Grip on INTELSAT

April 30, 2012 - Dust in the Wind

April 23, 2012 - Celebrate Astronomy Day

April 16, 2012 - Rover Rides Again

April 9, 2012 - Mercury’s Marvelous Morphology

April 2, 2012 - A Matter of Truss

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March 19, 2012 - Rocket Pioneer Centennial

March 12, 2012 - Southern Lights on Saturn

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February 27, 2012 - Hubble Upgrade

February 20, 2012 - Sideways Supernova

February 13, 2012 - Auroras Gone Wild

February 6, 2012 - Hubble Telescope Tune-Up

January 30, 2012 - Lunar Orbiter Liftoff

January 23, 2012 - Magellan Turns up the Stereo

January 16, 2012 - Southern Sibling Sees Stars

January 9, 2012 - Hitching a Ride Home

January 2, 2012 - Transforming the Space Frontier

December 26, 2011 - These Laws Can't Be Broken

December 19, 2011 - Long and Winding Road

December 12, 2011 - Blast from the Past

December 5, 2011 - It’s Just Like Folding a Map

November 28, 2011 - A Warmer, Wetter Mars

November 21, 2011 - Spy in the Sky

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The Week in Space

May 2-8, 2011

Breaking up Is Easy to Do As evidenced by the watchful eye of the Spitzer Space Telescope, comets sometimes pay the ultimate price when their eccentric orbits take them too close to the Sun. Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 began to fall apart in 1995 during one of its heated and tumultuous passages around the Sun. Since then, the comet has continued to fall to pieces, quite literally, and at least three dozen of them are visible in this infrared image from 2006. The flame-like objects are the comet’s fragments and their tails, while the dusty comet trail is the line bridging the fragments. Astronomers believe the icy comet finally cracked due to the thermal stress of the Sun. Other comet break-ups have been seen, most notably Shoemaker-Levy 9, whose fragments impacted Jupiter in 1994.

Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech