SOHO's view of comet Kudo-Fujikawa.
Click on image for full size
Image courtesy NASA
SOHO watches comet
News story originally written on January 31, 2003
On January 29, 2003 a comet passed very close to the Sun. The comet was too
close to the Sun to be viewed from Earth; the bright light from the Sun blocked our view of the comet. However, the SOHO
spacecraft, which observes the Sun continuously from an orbit 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, was able to
capture images of the comet's close pass by the Sun. SOHO has an instrument called a coronagraph,
which blocks out the brightest light from the Sun, allowing it a good view of the comet's closest approach.
Comet Kudo-Fujikawa (also called C/2002 X5) passed within 28.4 million kilometers (17.7 million miles) of the Sun. That was well inside the
orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. Mercury orbits at a distance of about 58 million kilometers from the Sun.
Several images from SOHO were combined to create this animation
(820K GIF) of the comet passing the Sun; and this high resolution animation (3.7M GIF). These are large files, and may take a long
time to download!
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