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PIA08438: Comet Stepping Stones
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows three of the many fragments making up Comet 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3. The picture also provides the best look yet at the crumbling comet's trail of debris.
 Target Name:  Schwassmann-Wachmann 3
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Spitzer Space Telescope 
 Instrument:  MIPS 
 Product Size:  2947 x 2035 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  California Institute of Technology 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA08438.tif (17.99 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA08438.jpg (1.157 MB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows three of the many fragments making up Comet 73P /Schwassman-Wachmann 3. The infrared picture also provides the best look yet at the crumbling comet's trail of debris, seen here as a bridge connecting the larger fragments.

The comet circles around our sun every 5.4 years. In 1995, it splintered apart into four pieces, labeled A through D, with C being the biggest. Since then, the comet has continued to fracture into dozens of additional pieces. This image is centered about midway between fragments C and B; fragment G can be seen in the upper right corner.

The comet's trail is made of dust, pebbles and rocks left in the comet's wake during its numerous journeys around the sun. Such debris can become the stuff of spectacular meteor showers on Earth.

This image was taken on April 1, 2006, by Spitzer's multi-band imaging photometer using the 24-micron wavelength channel.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image Addition Date:
2006-05-05