NEOWISE kite He seems to be luring a fellow space explorer into the sky in a beautiful new photo.
The image, which SpaceX posted on Twitter Today (July 20), it shows the brilliant comet burning on a two-stage stage Falcon 9 rocket on the platform of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The rocket won’t be there for much longer. It is set to launch Anasis 2, South Korea’s first military satellite, tonight during a four-hour window that opens at 5:30 pm EDT (2130 GMT). You can see the takeoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX.
Related: How to See NEOWISE Comet in the Night Sky Now
This will be the second flight for the first leg of this Falcon 9. In particular, on May 30 of this year, the booster helped launch the SpaceX landmark. Demo-2 test mission, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station aboard a Crew Dragon capsule.
Comet NEOWISE is the brightest Kite to honor Earth’s skies since Hale-Bopp in the mid-1990s. NEOWISE is currently visible to the naked eye to observers under light and dark skies in the northern hemisphere; Look just above the northwest horizon, below the Big Dipper, shortly after sunset.
The 3-mile-wide (5-kilometer) NEOWISE was discovered on March 27 by NASA’s near-Earth wide-field infrared object exploration spacecraft (hence the name). The comet made its closest approach to the sun on July 3 and is now returning to the outer solar system, where it spends most of its time.
Comet NEOWISE will make its closest approach to Earth on Wednesday (July 22), reaching 64 million miles (103 million km) from our planet. NEOWISE will likely be visible until the end of July, experts say. But they also emphasize how unpredictable comets are and how difficult it is to forecast their behavior.
So get out there and watch NEOWISE when conditions allow. We don’t know how long the comet will continue to present this show in the sky, and it won’t return to our neighborhood for another 6,800 years!
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
