Comet survives near solar-miss

Since I've been playing Kerbal Space Program all weekend, I figured I had to cover this story today. A comet by the name of Ison, has survived a fly-by with the biggest ball of burning gas in our solar system, the sun, despite the fact that comets are mostly made up of ice.

Comet Ison has been under scrutiny by astronomers and scientists for over a year, as part of the Sungrazing Comets project, which as you might imaging, has a certain speciality. “It's just typical that right at the end, when we said, ‘yes, it has faded out, it's died, we've lost it in the Sun', that a couple of hours later it should pop right back up again,” said head of the project, Karl Battams, to BBC News.”

Of course the comet isn't unscathed, but a bright spot currently viewable by astronomers, seems to suggest that part of it did survive the fly-by.

It's not clear at this time, whether the comet was piloted by these men

No one knows whether the comet fragment will survive as it continues its orbit away from the sun, but Battams and pals urge people to be patient asthey collate their data and look at more images to determine the likely future for Ison. 

KitGuru Says: I've made it to the moon a couple of times on Kerbal so far, but never close to the sun. Maybe that should be tonight's project. It'll need oh so many rockets, but it'll be worth it.

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