A once-in-80,000-year sight made its closest method to Earth this weekend, and a surprising video recorded in California presentations Comet C/2023 A3 streaking around the evening sky.A NASA and Ecu spacecraft watched as a newly came upon comet dubbed the “Halloween comet” met its loss of life after its shut method to the Solar.Consistent with NASA, the SOHO spacecraft captured the video underneath of comet C/2024 S1 ATLAS darting towards the Solar. It reached its closest method to the Solar, referred to as perihelion, on Monday at 7:30 a.m. ET. 
NASA’s SOHO spacecraft presentations C/2024 S1 ATLAS (coming into from backside proper) transferring towards the Solar. (NASA)To not be puzzled with Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, which has wowed skygazers all the way through October, C/2024 S1 was once handiest lately came upon via an observatory in Hawaii on Sept. 27. Then again, we infrequently knew this comet prior to it was once long past. Because it approached the Solar, the comet started breaking apart into items, consistent with NASA.”This comet was once most likely already a rubble pile by the point it entered SOHO’s box of view,” stated U.S. Naval Analysis Laboratory’s Karl Battams, the lead for NASA’s Sungrazer Mission.The Sungrazer Mission is a NASA-funded program, primarily based at the the Sun Physics Division of the U.S. Naval Analysis Laboratory, learning comets that get extraordinarily on the subject of the Solar, serving to higher our working out of comet orbits, composition and evolution. Citizen scientists can give a contribution to the challenge and feature helped to find greater than 5,000 comets for the reason that challenge was once based in 1995, consistent with NASA.Scientists known as this comet a real “sungrazer” as it handed inside of 1% of Earth’s distance to the Solar.Comet C/2024 S1 ATLAS “has been utterly vaporized because of this,” NASA stated.
