[meteorite-list] NEOWISE Spots a Comet That Looked Like an Asteroid: C/2013 UQ4 (Catalina)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:51:07 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201407241851.s6OIp7AC008899_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-241

NEOWISE Spots a Comet That Looked Like an Asteroid
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 23, 2014

Comet C/2013 UQ4 (Catalina) has been observed by NASA's Near-Earth
Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft just one
day after passing through its closest approach to the sun. The comet
glows brightly in infrared wavelengths, with a dust tail streaking more
than 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) across the sky. Its spectacular
activity is driven by the vaporization of ice that has been preserved
from the time of planet formation 4.5 billion years ago.

"The tail forms a faint fan as the smaller dust particles are more
easily pushed away from the sun by the radiation pressure of the
sunlight," said James Bauer, researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

C/2013 UQ4 takes more than 450 years to orbit the sun once and spends
most of its time far away at very low temperatures. Its orbit is also
retrograde, which means that the comet moves around the sun in the
opposite direction to the planets and asteroids.

The comet was originally thought to be an asteroid, as it appeared
inactive when discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 23, 2013.
NEOWISE also observed the comet to be inactive on New Year's Eve, 2013,
but since then the comet has become highly active, allowing astronomers
around the world to observe it. The comet's activity should decline as
it once again returns to the cold recesses of space.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the NEOWISE mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory
in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace &
Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science
operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and
Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about NEOWISE, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/neowise

Elizabeth Landau
818-354-6425
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
elizabeth.landau at jpl.nasa.gov

2014-241
Received on Thu 24 Jul 2014 02:51:07 PM PDT