A comet will be buzzing Mars this Sunday

[-Velocity-]

Here's views from Opportunity. A little disappointing unless you consider that the cameras were made for taking images during the day.

All the spots that look like stars are in fact hot/dead pixels or cosmic ray hits; this was a longish exposure and the camera does not track the motion of the stars, so the only stars are the elongated streaks. You can see that the comet does not streak in the same direction as the stars, that must be due to its high rate of angular motion.

An annotated version. This puts it in perspective; the comet only looks as bright as perhaps 2nd magnitude. However, that's probably because the camera lacks the SNR or exposure length necessary to capture much of the coma, or any of the tail of the comet, which would probably bring the integrated magnitude well into the negative numbers.

Edited October 20, 2014 by |Velocity|

[Motokid600]

Did they get Curiosity to snap a picture by chance?

[Kryten]

Yes, but not released yet. It's unlikely to be much better though, it was taken under similar conditions.

[Streetwind]

Well, Curiosity's Camera is better. Keep in mind that Opportunity is using 12+ year old tech at this point, which was further constrained by the size, weight and power envelope of the relatively small solar rover. Curiosity on the other hand can rely on its RTG for power, is so large that the choice of imaging equipment matters little, and is (at most) half as old.

But yeah, what I'm really hoping for is Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Mangalyaan. The former is getting a bit old, but "being a giant camera" is pretty much its job description. I bet it doesn't have to hide behind the newcomers at all. The latter is only a demo satellite with rudimentary instrumentation, but it's by far the most modern of all camera-touting Mars robots (MAVEN isn't built for taking photos). And I think I read somewhere that it got the closest to the comet by a fair margin because India is feeling a little bit overconfident after their recent historic success...

[-Velocity-]

MRO images released. According to the accompanying information released by NASA, the brightest few pixels in the top images are probably the comet's nucleus, indicating a diameter of slightly less than 500 meters.