With each visit to the sun, a comet is being torn to pieces. It’s called Comet 323P/SOHO, and it is drawn to what will cause its demise. Here’s more from Phys.org:
Comets with the SOHO designation were discovered with the SOHO spacecraft. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is a joint ESA/NASA mission launched in 1995. Its mission is to study the sun, and though the mission was scheduled to last two years, it’s been operating for over 26 years.
As a by-product of its solar observations, the spacecraft has discovered 4,000 comets. Most of these comets are sungrazers, a class of comets very close to the sun. Astronomers think most sungrazers are chunks of a much larger comet that broke apart. 323P isn’t a sungrazer; it’s a near-sun comet. Small comets can completely evaporate in one close approach to the sun, while larger ones can survive many. For most of them, their small perihelions spell their eventual doom.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
