Comet Lovejoy Plunges Into the Sun and Survives

Posted by timothy on Saturday December 17, 2011 @06:00PM from the part-of-brian-aker's-career-path dept.

boldie writes with a link to NASA's account of comet Lovejoy's close encounter with the sun. Excerpting: "This morning, an armada of spacecraft witnessed something that many experts thought impossible. Comet Lovejoy flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact. ... The comet's close encounter was recorded by at least five spacecraft: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO probes, Europe's Proba2 microsatellite, and the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The most dramatic footage so far comes from SDO, which saw the comet go in (movie) and then come back out again (movie)." Here are larger QuickTime versions of the comet's entrance (22MB) and exit (26MB).

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Coolness factor re: comet passes "through the Sun" by RichZellich · 2011-12-17 18:27 · Score: 0, Redundant

At least as cool as the actual event is the phrase "This morning, an armada of spacecraft..." - did you think you'd ever hear that phrase in a news report in your lifetime?